


Woodpeckers

by apollos



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: 1890s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Brothels, F/M, Homophobia, M/M, Written for the Metalocalypse Big Bang 2013-14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:26:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the late 1800s many Scandinavians immigrated to the Great Lakes and took jobs in the logging industry. Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth were among them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

On his off weeks Skwisgaar likes to indulge himself. The first indulgence is always a long, hot bath in his house, steam curling off the water, all of the stress and tension of weeks of hard work seeping from his muscles. The second indulgence is always a good night's sleep, often around fourteen or fifteen hours, every bone in his body thanking him for being allowed to rest in quiet and peace When he wakes up in the morning he fixes himself a good, proper breakfast, one of meat and eggs and milk and even an orange if he finds himself with the money to buy one. He might walk down the main street and go to the bar, drinking with his work friends and congratulating themselves on a job well done, or he might go to the whorehouse. Sometimes he manages to pick a loose woman up at the bar or on the streets. Skwisgaar has several bastard children, all with his classic Swedish coloring and good looks, that he chooses to ignore. Every woman so far has moved out of town due to shame, anyway.

Today is no different. He steps back into town feeling wrung out, the heavy weight of the axe lingering between his fingers. He walks through the roads until he finds his house, a squat cabin sandwiched between other squat cabins, and walks through the door. Though his mind is elsewhere, thinking solely of the bath, his body manages to direct itself to boiling the water and cracking into the apple he had bought on the way home. He collapses onto the chair he built himself that sits in the kitchen, biting into the apple and closing his eyes. Sometimes he thinks this relief is better than sex. He strips before the water finishes boiling, depositing his dirty clothes in a neat pile in his bedroom. He'll wash them tomorrow. He takes the water and dumps it into the bathtub, immerses himself. His skin reddens. He sighs.

He soaks for an hour, his head resting against the rim of the tub. It is fall, the days long and the air crisp, his house musty. He loves this time of year, loves the pleasure that he gives himself for working. He decides, while soaking in the tub, that he will visit the whorehouse tomorrow. His favorite is a new girl, young and inexperienced but still with a childlike innocence and full lips. Her name is Dory and she's to be married to the local town clown and it always makes Skwisgaar laugh to imagine the two wed, the whore and the scoundrel. It is fitting.

He rises from the tub and takes his towel, rinsing himself. Even the rough material feels like a luxury. He tosses it onto the floor, no longer caring of neatness and thinking only of sleep. He trudges onward to bed, naked but obscured by the heavy curtains draped over his windows that the breeze fails to move. He folds himself into bed, laying on his back underneath a thick blanket, his arms straight at his sides. His eyes flutter closed and it is not long before sleep seizes him. He does not dream—he never does when he sleeps as deep as this, returning from a long stretch of work.

He rises in the morning and dresses in trousers and a button-down with the sleeves pushed towards his elbows, suspenders over his shoulders. He lets his hair hang free around his shoulders, glad not to have to tie it behind him as he does during work. He whistles a tune and drums his fingers against his thighs as he exits his house after preparing and consuming a hearty meal. He walks to the whorehouse, which is a white two-story building in the middle of town with velvet curtains hanging in the windows that doesn't pretend to be anything else. A woman stands in front, wearing a dress with an indecent neckline and taking puffs from a pipe. She smiles at Skwisgaar as he passes her and though he doesn't recognize her he smiles back. She's not to his tastes, anyway, an unpleasantness around her face, something unfeminine in the way she carries herself.

Inside the whorehouse he approaches the reception area, drapes himself over the table in front of the owner, a German immigrant named Lavona that loves him for the business, hates him for his personality. Because of this he finds it necessary to attempt to charm her, to smile at her and fold his hands underneath his chin.

"Hello, Skwisgaar," she says, accent rich and dripping off her words.

"Hello, Lavonas," he says. "Ams Dory in today?" His own accent, a relic from his recent emigration from Sweden, coats his words as well.

"Yes," she says. She crosses her arms underneath her breasts, exposed in the shirt she's wearing. Lavona favors men's clothes, a controversy amongst the town. "Of course she is. You know where to find her."

"Dat I does," Skwisgaar says. He winks at her and straights up, untucks his shirt from his pants just to rile her up, and walks off.

Because Dory is new she works downstairs, the first room on the right of the hallway. He enters already feeling the stir of arousal in his loins and is not disappointed to see Dory sitting on the sparse bed, her legs crossed and her skirt hitched up to her hips. "Skwisgaar," she says, his name but a wispy breath of a word, and Skwisgaar walks over to her. He wastes no time in connecting their mouths, entangling his hands in her short—almost boyish—hair and pulling her up. He fucks her on her back on the bed, chest to chest, quick and efficient. He takes the time to pleasure her, something he knows will be a treat, and then he pays her and leaves.

He stops at the general store and stocks up on a few items, returning them to his house before going to the bar. He should chop some wood but considering he's just gotten back from a job the idea makes him sort of sick. Instead he shrugs in the general direction of the forest and turns around to head to the bar. He knows his work friends will be there—those no-life drunkards—waiting to discuss work or the weather or whores. He's looking forward more to getting drunk than he is to the actual part of socialization. It's not a bad life.

The bar is a few buildings down from the whorehouse, low and leaking smells of booze and smoke, the inside poorly lit and overcrowded. He finds his friends at their usual table, shoved in a corner and shoved too close together. They're sporting huge mugs of frothy beer, their voices raucous and breath rancid already. Skwisgaar slides in next to Murderface, flags down a waitress to order some beer for himself. He looks across the table to see Nathan with a fat cigar between his teeth, holding a fistful of bills and Pickles with his head dropped to the surface. He raises it and looks with sleepy and unfocused eyes at Skwisgaar, offers a greeting tinted with an Irish accent before releasing his head back down in a way that looks almost painful.

"Hey," Nathan says. He takes the cigar from between his teeth and sucks on the end of it. "We were just talking about you, weren't we, Murderface?"

Skwisgaar tracks the conversation to look at Murderface nodding his head. "Yeah, juscht schaying you were probably with your whoresch," Murderface says. Skwisgaar can tell that Murderface's trying to sound spiteful but instead he sounds envious, his eyes narrowed.

"Were you?" Nathan punctuates the question with a hearty mouthful of beer.

Skwisgaar nods and relaxes in his seat. "Ja," he says. The waitress appears with his beer and he takes it, throwing money at her and winking. She receives the money and raises a hand to her chest, looking flattered, a blush rising high on her cheeks and winking back at him. He knows it's for show to get tips, but he enjoys the show, so he flings an extra dollar her way.

"How do you  _do_ it?" Murderface asks to Skwisgaar's left. Skwisgaar doesn't even bother looking at Murderface, just shrugs and brings the beer to his mouth.

"By not being fuckin' hideous ike you," Nathan says. Skwisgaar snorts and Murderface protests—Pickles appears to have fallen asleep.

They drink together and shoot the shit until Skwisgaar's starting to feel a little lightheaded from the copious amounts of beer, warm around the edges. Pickles wakes up and pulls a deck of cards from his pocket and they start to play, getting a pot going. Nathan wins, Murderface losing miserably and storming off afterwards. Nathan collects the money in his arms and grins with the cigar stub between his teeth, Pickles laughing and clapping him on the back. Skwisgaar excuses himself after that, having reached his threshold of these people after living with them over the past month on the job, and returns to the whorehouse. Dory's out so he shacks up with one of his other favorites, a portly middle-aged woman with two kids of questionable parentage, a veteran with a room upstairs. She declines payment, smiles at him with yellowed teeth.

He goes home and does his laundry then shaves, because while his friends may prefer that rugged outdoorsman look, he does not. He likes to marvel at himself in the mirror hanging above his sink, one of the first things he bought after coming to America two years ago. The day moves by slowly without his job to occupy his mind but he progresses, going to his bedroom next to take his guitar out and sit on the porch outside to play. He attracts a crowd as always but ignores them, loses himself in his music. He has a few songs he's written and memorized and he works through them. His skill at guitar is something useless in the long run but wonderful as a hobby, his deft fingers working the strings faster than anybody he's ever encountered, swelling the air with the sound. Children come and play near him just to mooch off the melody, their mothers watching him more than they watch them, but Skwisgaar keeps his eyes on the strings.

He plays until the sun sinks in the sky and the children and their mothers return home, the fathers trickling in from their own wimpier jobs. Skwisgaar stands up and stretches, feels his back crack. He watches the sunset and feels the same feelings he does every time he watches the sunset after coming back from the logging camp—overall satisfaction but with a lingering boredom, restlessness. Skwisgaar is a man of improvement, and when there is no way to show off or improve himself he starts to feel antsy, uneasy. It's why he moved to America in the first place, abandoning his own whore mother in their poverty-stricken Swedish town. It's why he took the job at the logging camp, to prove himself a man, and now he's done that. He tries not to dwell on it too long, putting his guitar inside his house and making his way back to the bar for the evening.

The day after that follows much the same pattern, although instead of visiting the whorehouse he finds a woman on the street and drags her by the wrist into an alley on the way home from the bar that night. The days following that, however, are methodical, almost meaningless, though not necessarily negative. He rises in the morning and eats breakfast, shaves, collects anything he might need from the general store or elsewhere, visits the bar, plays his guitar, fucks some women. It's growing cold in Wisconsin, the days short and nights long, and the last job of the year before the snowfall sets in and becomes unbearable is nearing. At the bar with the guys they talk mostly of work, of complaints. They all preform pretty much the same job, chopping down trees and transporting them to the river or train, and tended to sleep in the same building at camp, but something about being off the job gives them the ability to talk about it in more abstract terms. Free from physical exhaustion and discomfort their minds are sharper, more alert, quicker to make connections and analyze. For this crowd it is admittedly not much, but it is something, and they raise their beers and bitch about the coldness that seeps inside of their clothes and bones, of the hardass foreman of Woodpecker Lumber Company, a man by the name of Charles Foster Ofdensen.

The day before he returns to work Skwisgaar gets up early in the morning, easing his body into the schedule, and packs his things. He makes sure that he has enough wood and other nonperishable supplies for when he gets back, knowing he'll be tired, cold and reluctant. He goes to the whorehouse afterwards, drapes himself over Lavona's counter and smiles at her, asks if Dory is in.

"Of course she is," Lavona says, her voice clipped as ever and her nose turned up at him. "Nathan was around here the other day and said that you guys are heading back up, is that true?"

Skwisgaar nods. "You ams goingks to miss me, rights?" he says, tilting his head sideways and batting his eyelashes at him.

"You, no. Nathan, yes, obviously. Go see Dory now, you pig." She waves him off, looks to the side, as frigid and as much of a bitch as ever.

He goes into Dory's room and finds her sitting on the bed, her legs crossed over each other. She looks at him as he unbuttons his shirt and undoes his suspenders, speaks. "Lavona told me you're going away again," she says, her voice still with the petulance of a young child's.

"Dat ams correct," Skwisgaar says. He rolls his trousers down over his hips and steps out of them, along with his shoes, before walking to the bed and crouching over her.

"I think I'll be married by the time you're back," she says, furrowing her eyebrows. He kisses the ridge that forms between them. "This is our last time together, then. I'll be a wife."

Skwisgaar nods and kisses down the bridge of her nose, the tip, her philtrum, her mouth. He breaks away and whispers, "Then let us makes dis specials," and joins their mouths together again, knots one of his hands in her skirts.

But Skwisgaar has had his fair share of woman, has planted his seed in a fair number of fertile wombs, and what he does that day with Dory on a threadbare mattress is nothing special. He tucks his shirt back into his pants and slips his suspenders over his shoulders, muses that perhaps he's become immune to the pleasures of the feminine flesh as Dory adjusts her skirts and her hairs in the vanity. He gives her a pleasant goodbye and exits the whorehouse, waving at Lavona on the way out. If he has indeed become immune, the weeks he's about to spend on the job will surely fix that, and he's not too worried.

He slides himself into place at his table in the bar. His friends are rowdy, Nathan's arms slung around Pickles's shoulder and moving him back and forth while they sing some tired old song, Murderface snorting and banging his fists on the table, more than usual. Skwisgaar accepts a mug of beer from the waitress and brings it to his lips, propping a single eyebrow up at Nathan and Pickles while they finish the song in a long, drawn-out note, Pickles as high as he can go and Nathan as low.

"Skwisgaar!" Pickles says, his eyes popping open. "Welcome, buddy. Excited, eh? 'Nother six weeks with the Woodpeckers."

"Ja," Skwisgaar says, humorless. He throws back some beer, puts his mug on the table, punctuation.

"We're getting a new one," Pickles continues. There's three empty mugs in front of him, a few shot glasses scattered about, and he's smiling hugely but unequally. "A baby. A greenhorn. Just moved here, just got the job, did you hear?"

Skwisgaar shakes his head, his hair bouncing around his face. To his side Murderface shakes his head as well.

"I did," Nathan says, looking at Pickles, then at Skwisgaar. "Heard he's from Norway, too. Isn't that close to where you came from? Some place in Europe?"

"It's right next to it, you idiot," Pickles says, and he punches Nathan in the arm, retaining that ridiculous smile of his. Then, addressing Skwisgaar: "Right?"

"Ja," Skwisgaar repeats, bringing the beer to his mouth and hiding his own bemused grin.

" _Well_ ," Pickles says. He produces the deck of cards he has on him and shuffles them as he speaks. "He's a real young'un, this kid. I think his name is Loki, or Toki, somethin' like that. Wartooth is the last name, ain't that the most brutal shit you've heard in your life? Anyways." He deals the cards, one to himself, one to Nathan, one to Skwisgaar, one to Murderface, and over again. "He's like, seventeen, or somethin'. Real young."

"He lives here?" Skwisgaar asks, collecting his cards in his hands as he's given them. An Ace of Hearts, a Five of Hearts, a Two of Spades, cards sliding across the tabletop faster than he can make them out.

"That," Pickles says, dealing the last set of cards, "I don't know. Let's play, boys. Poker. Place your bets, come on." He swoops his own cards into his hand, teeters in his seat.

They play the game three times, Skwisgaar winning, then Nathan, then Pickles, Murderface growing gradually more frustrated until he takes all the cards for himself and throws them to the floor of the bar. Skwisgaar puts his head in his hand out of embarrassment before it occurs to him that he could just  _leave_  and proceeds to do so. The sun has set in the sky by then and he's feeling loose and light, his limbs jangling, certain that he could do anything, take on anybody. This type of mood is the one that leads to bar fights and nights with less desirable women but tonight he's not so lucky. Tonight he makes it home without any sort of altercation.

He's not tired and he's not looking forward to returning to work so soon, making the idea of going to bed and speeding up that inevitability even more unappealing. To remedy this he scoops his guitar into his hands and sits on the bed, the tired mattress sinking and the old bedframe squeaking. He plays slow and soft, a little sad, telling himself that it's late and he doesn't want to wake up the whole town and have them on his ass. He normally doesn't bring his guitar with him to work—it's too precious, a relic from his time in Sweden—but he thinks that maybe this time he will. Last time without it he had gotten annoyed, stuck in that cabin with Nathan, Murderface and Pickles and their rambunctiousness. Yes, he'll definitely bring his guitar, he decides, and he stands up to settle it in its stand against the wall before stripping and tucking himself into bed.

He wakes up before the sun rises and collects his things, folds his guitar into its case and slings it over his back. It's four in the morning, maybe a little bit earlier, a Sunday. The men won't be going to church, but he never cared for church anyway, doesn't believe in God. He exits his house and makes way to the train station. They take the train from town to the camp but he's heard from Pickles, the oldest in the group that's been on this job for twenty years, his parents having migrated out of Ireland during the Famine when he was a toddler, that they used to have to walk the distance. Murderface, who's been on the job for about five years less than Pickles and was the son of a Confederate General that moved north after defeat, affirms this whenever the conversation comes up. Nathan, who's a quarter Indian from a tryst his grandmother had with a chief and started just three years back like Skwisgaar, is ambivalent about the issue and glad to have the trains.

He sees his usual ragtag group and walks over to them. They've got a burlap sack of clothes between the three of them, currently settling on Pickles's back, but Skwisgaar's vanity impedes him from  _not_ bringing his grooming supplies and an ample amount of clothes in a considerably sized sack for himself.

"Schuch a girl," Murderface says, nodding his head at Skwisgaar's bag as he places it on the ground. Skwisgaar looks up to sneer at him, not justifying it with a response. It's a tired insult, along with Murderface calling him inverted.

"Back on the job, boys," Pickles says. He's smoking something from a pipe, pulls it away to grin around the cloud that's forming from his mouth. "You excited?"

"Yeah," Nathan says. He looks around at the relatively empty platform and then sits on the ground, his knees up but spread wide. " _Excited_."

"Well, you could try and look it," Pickles says, looking at Nathan and nudging him in the hip with his foot.

They stand around in silence after that, watching men flock to the platform. Some of them are accompanied by wives, a few by children, that they kiss goodbye. They recognize the majority of the faces, a few new men appearing among the usual and looking sort of nervous, including a young guy that seems to fit Pickles's description from the night before. He's standing on the opposite end of the platform as them with his hands clasped in front of him, running his fingers over each other, and his head down. Something compels Skwisgaar to go and make nice with him, but it's early in the morning, dark and he's too tired to move. The train chugs up and they begin to board, the boy disappearing from Skwisgaar's thoughts.

The ride isn't too long, just from town to the forest, the train there only for their convenience. The sun comes up on the way, throwing oranges and blues across a landscape of white from the light snowfall last night. Skwisgaar sits in a row of three seats by himself, his legs spread out over the other two and his head on the window. The first time he'd made this trip he'd been fascinated by the unexpected beauty of untamed wilderness, having been a city boy in Sweden, and somewhat excited by the prosperous and manly job he had been about to take on. Now he's bored of the landscape, though its grand beauty socks him in the stomach on occasion, and more up to rest his eyes a bit before taking on the more often than not tedious and straining job. The others on the train seem to share his sentiment, a sleepiness settling in on them like one huge, communal blanket.

There are always between eighty-five and ninety men on the job and twenty men to a cabin, means meant that Skwisgaar, Nathan, Murderface and Pickles usually get a cabin to themselves with a couple of stragglers. Filing into the camp and heading towards the last cabin on purpose, Skwisgaar spots that guy from before, alone and looking at the ground all nervously. That same something that had grasped him before pushes Skwisgaar to walk over to the guy and put a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. The guy has hair that just hits the nape of his neck and is in need of a good trim, and when he turns around Skwisgaar sees blue eyes with pinprick pupils that dilate into a frightened expression.

"Heys," Skwisgaar said, now awkward. He hates feeling awkward. He retracts his hand and clears his throat. "You's new, ja?"

"Yes," the guy says. He has a deeper voice than Skwisgaar thought he would, but it's sort of shaky.

"Wells, uh." Skwisgaar clears his throat again and looks to see his friends walking into their cabin. He puts his hand on the guy's shoulder again and steers him towards the cabin. "Rooms with us, ja? We's shows you the ropes and all dat shit."

"Why are you doing this?" the guy asks. He doesn't stop walking, though, instead picking up his pace to match Skwisgaar's longer stride. Like most everybody else he's half a head taller than the guy.

Skwisgaar shrugs. "I heards from a guy—his name am Pickle, you'll meets him ins a few seconds—dat dere's a young guy dat's from Norway. Wells, ams a Swede. Camaraderie." They're at the door now, a diagonal line of footprints left in the light layer of snow behind them. Skwisgaar opens the door for the guy and only then remembers to ask his name.

"Um, Toki. Toki Warooth." The kid looks at Skwisgaar like he's unaccustomed to common gestures of politeness and walks through the doorway.  
"I ams Skwisgaar Skwigelf," Skwisgaar says, pulling the door to the cabin shut as he follows Toki inside.

Skwisgaar goes to his usual bed and throws his stuff on the top bunk and lays his guitar on the bottom before reaching behind him to tie his hair back. He watches Toki from the corner of his eye as he claims the bed in the corner, away from the main cluster of guys, and proceeds to linger there. If Skwisgaar had felt awkward before Toki was the very definition, standing there and playing with the hem of his untucked shirt.

"New guy, eh?" Pickles says. He rises from where he'd been sitting on the bottom bunk of the bed across from Skwisgaar's, smoking. "Welcome 'board. What's your name? Something 'oki, right?"

"Toki," Toki says, his fingers still on the hem and his eyes cast downward.

"Well, hell, Toki, don't be shy. C'mere." Pickles extends the hand holding his pipe, pointing it in Toki's direction. As if a cat coaxed by treats Toki creeps forward, coming into the main circle. Pickles smiles and nods at him, returning the pipe to his mouth.

The foreman reaches the cabin then, opening the door and poking his head in. "Ah, welcome, gentleman," he says, opening the door wider but not coming inside. "I want you all out in front of the cabins in half an hour."

"Sure thing, boss," Nathan says, the slightest bite of sarcasm on the  _boss_. Toki, who has now come to stand beside Skwisgaar, turns to look at him, and Skwisgaar shakes his head. He attempts to communicate with eyebrow twitches and lip twists that it's not that Nathan dislikes the foreman, it's that Nathan dislikes rigid authority, and Ofdensen is as rigid and authoritative as they come.

Ofdensen nods and steps back, pulling the door with him. Pickles bursts out laughing, whatever is in that pipe getting to his head. Toki regards him with a suspicious look and Skwisgaar smiles, biting back a chuckle. He's going to enjoy Toki, he thinks, if only for his naivety.

They settle themselves in the cabin, Skwisgaar fitting his nice flannel blanket over the top bunk and organizing his supplies around his guitar on the bottom one. Murderface, who has been asleep since the second his ass hit his bed, snores on. Pickles shares his pipe with Nathan. Toki drifts back to his corner and loiters there until Skwisgaar rolls his eyes and calls him over, makes small talk about the weather, the job, Toki's journey to America. Toki provides only the tiniest of details, talking in vague terms about his past, and Skwisgaar learns nothing of substance, not even Toki's arrival date. When the half hour is over Nathan wakes Murderface up and they, along with their other three cabin mates that they have been ignoring (and probably will ignore in the future) leave the cabin.

The five cabins and main mess hall and supply sheds flank the forest, a medium-sized clearing littered with pine and snow a buffer between the two. Ofdensen is standing at the mouth of the forest, symmetrical between two trees, and facing the influx of men from the cabins. When the eighty-eight men collect themselves before them he clears his throat, his voice surprisingly loud and booming for the slight, bookish man he is.

"Welcome back, Woodpeckers," he says. The first time Skwisgaar heard this speech it had invigorated him, made him feel an important part of a greater whole, but now it feels stale. Toki's standing beside him, Nathan, Pickles and Murderface in front of them, and he steals a glance at Toki to gauge his reaction as Charles keeps talking. "It is imperative that we do a good job this time around, for profits and because lumbering is important to America. Without us we wouldn't have buildings or carts or beautiful woodworks. Last year our production increased by five percent—let's try to make it ten percent this year. We can do this, men. I have faith in you." This speech that Skwisgaar knows Ofdensen to be reciting from memory is the only time he hears the man speak with such confidence and command, and Toki looks even more nervous.

"I don't think—" Toki whispers, looking up at Skwisgaar.

Skwisgaar shakes his head. "Amns't bad. Dis speech is de same every time. Doesn't gets on his bad side by beingks an idiot and you'll be fine."

Toki nods and turns his attention back to Ofdensen, though he doesn't seem fully reassured. In the dramatic pause the men begin to talk among themselves much like Skwisgaar and Toki just had, the buzz of deep voices in conversation rising, until Ofdensen once more clears his throat to get their attention.

"You have the rest of the day to get situated but remember, we begin work before sunrise tomorrow morning. You are dismissed."


	2. Chapter Two

It's not too bad to get up early in the morning once you get used to it, but enough time had lapsed between jobs that Skwisgaar's body has grown accustomed to sleeping in late and it's a bitch to get out of bed the following morning. He sits up and hunches over in his bed, the flannel blanket pooling in his lap as he rubs his eyes. It's dark in the cabin, all the lanterns and candles blown out, but from across the empty bunks Skwisgaar can make out the dark shape of Toki curled in bed. They had spent the majority of yesterday catching up with acquaintances from other towns and preparing their tools for the workday, but Toki had eaten dinner with them in the hall, even laughed when Nathan pushed Murderface out of his chair and caused Murderface's soup to spill in his lap. Skwisgaar wonders if Toki is awake yet, gets his answer when he stirs and sits up himself, his bare back to Skwisgaar. He can't quite tell in the dark but something is off there, the skin two different shades in an odd pattern. He averts his eyes and gets out of bed, gets dressed for the day. Toki mirrors his actions.

The other men in the cabin rise at their own pace, Murderface last and only when Pickles prods him awake. They're quiet, because it's early in the morning and they're tired, and they make their way to the dining hall for breakfast. It seems to have snowed overnight, a fresh layer on the ground. Skwisgaar kicks at is as he walks alone in silence, then remembers that he's sort of taken it upon himself to watch out for the new guy and waits for him. When Skwisgaar had started out he'd had a similar set-up with one of the older guys on the job, a man by the name of Magnus Hammersmith, who he became friends with Nathan, Murderface and Pickles through. But Magnus had gone insane and stabbed another logger to death, was now spending the rest of his days in an asylum, and Skwisgaar had assimilated into his place among his friends.

They trudge to the dining hall and collect their breakfasts of buckwheat pancakes and steak slathered in grease, cookies and hash ringing the plates. They sit at the tail-end of one of the long wooden tables, Skwisgaar and Toki on one side with Nathan, Murderface and Pickles on the other, and begin to eat. They're not early but not late, the dining hall half-filled with men as more filter in through the doors. There's a low hum of conversation hanging in the air but the majority of the men are somnolent and therefore silent. Skwisgaar eats with gusto, aware that he'll need his strength, and tells Toki to do the same when he leaves a fourth of his food on the plate.

"Yeah, I'm going to get more," Murderface says, rising from the table with his plate. "God, I love this schtuff." He looks at his empty plate and smiles, goes back to get more food.

There's a minute of nothing and then Nathan says, "Me, too," and leaves the table with an empty plate. Murderface returns with seconds, sits down and chows down, and Toki pushes the remainder of his food away.

"Toki," Pickles says, nodding at Toki's plate. "You're going to regret that, my friend."

"Ja," Skwisgaar says, but he shrugs and leans forward to grab the remaining cookie and pancake from Toki's plate. "You needs yous strength. It ams  _a lot_ harder den it looks."

"It's alright," Toki says. He folds his hands over his stomach. "I amns't a big guys like Nathan or Moidaface." Murderface looks up from his plate when he hears his name and, apparently deeming the conversation uninteresting, looks down as Toki continues to talk. "It's alright," he repeats.

"Whatever you say," Pickles says. He's been finished with his food, is reclining with his forearms on the table.

After breakfast they collect their tools and head into the forest. Ofdensen stops Toki to talk to them when they're on the fringe, catching Skwisgaar's attention, and Skwisgaar hangs back to catch Ofdensen giving Toki instructions and asking him if there's anybody he can learn from.

"I'll does it," Skwisgaar says, coming into the conversation. He's holding a saw across his shoulders. "He can works with mines crew. I needs another guy to cut de trees wit, anyway." Before Magnus had gone insane, that had been their job as sawyers; now Skwisgaar rotates men through the position. It'd be sort of nice to have a permanent partner, somebody to have his back, maybe.

"That's good, then," Ofdensen says, regarding Skwisgaar. Regarding Toki: "Go get another crosscut."

Skwisgaar walks with Toki to get the saw, Toki hoisting it over his shoulders without much difficulty. His hair swings in his face and Skwisgaar winces; he'd made that same mistake, letting his hair go loose, and it had blinded him and whipped at his face, generally gotten in the way. He made a mental note to do something about that when they get to the trees but for now they walk, holding their saws across their shoulders and holding a simple conversation. Skwisgaar tells Toki not to worry, that he's the best sawyer at the camp, and he needs to keep up. They get into the forest and find Nathan, Murderface and Pickles hanging out by a cluster of trees, Nathan standing with his oxen, Pickles with his axe and Murderface with a measuring stick.

"Toki a sawyer?" Pickles asks. He has the axe over one shoulder, his foot propped up on the tree behind him. The shock of his hair, a wild mess of red, stands out against the bleak landscape.

Toki nods. They don't waste time with small talk, instead seeking out a tree without that many surrounding them. Nathan and Murderface drift away, needed elsewhere for their ox teamster duties, while Toki and Skwisgaar take a position one either side of the tree. Murderface leaves behind his measuring stick, which lays in the snow off to the side as Pickles sets about clearing the area. Skwisgaar shouts instructions to Toki as they cut into the wood with one of their saws, Skwisgaar from the left and Toki from the right. The tree falls the fastest Skwisgaar has ever falled a tree, Pickles whooping and hollering with joy as he clears more brush away. Skwisgaar measures out the appropriate sixteen feet of tree and they take the other crosscut to shape it.

"This amns't as hard as I thoughts it woulds be," Toki grunts out as they work on the falled tree.

Skwisgaar pauses and looks up, wipes sweat away from his brow. It's cold out but his skin is hot, an interesting contrast. "Reallies?" he asks, surprised; his first time on the job had been difficult, almost horrible.

Toki looks up at him. They make eye contact for what Skwisgaar thinks is the first time, and it's a shock to him, the heat in his body exploding. He chooses to ignore that, blames it on the physical exertion. "Yeah," Toki says. "I cuts de trees in Norway all de time. Dis is easier, even." He leans down again and tugs on the saw, signaling Skwisgaar to get back to work.

Skwisgaar narrows his eyes and starts carving again. "Dis ams only yous first tree," he says. "You'll sees."

"Yeah, kid," Pickles offers. He's sitting in the snow smoking his pipe, his job for now done. "The first tree's the easiest. Wait 'till the second. You guys almost done with that?" He gestures at the tree with his pipe

Skwisgaar pauses and considers it. "Ja. Gets Nathan."

"You got it." Pickles stands up and stretches, stows his pipe away, and leaves.

Skwisgaar's now alone with Toki in the quiet forest, the only noise the grind of the saw against wood and the occasional chirping of the birds. If he strains his ears he can hear the crunch of pine and snow under boots, the low pitch of shouts from one man to the next. Skwisgaar likes the first day on the job: the saws are sharp and efficient, the men are lively but not rambunctious, the forest is quiet and the work is mind-numbing. He looks up over the tree to Toki to check up on him, or something, and sees that what he can see of Toki's face through the cloak of his hair is calm and focused. They finish the log, Nathan and Pickles still missing, and Skwisgaar takes his gloves off to stretch his fingers.

"Hey," Skwisgaar says, the sight of Toki's hair sticking to his face reminding him. "You shoulds ties yous hair back. Gets in de way."

"Hows? Doesn't have anythings to ties it up with." Toki raises his gloved hands to make this point.

"A knot, obvskilees," Skwisgaar says. To make this point he turns around and undoes his own hair—though it is tied with a band—and loops it. He undoes the knot and reties it in a low ponytail, turns around to see Toki with his hair behind his head.

"Dis ams gonna sucks to gets out later," Toki says, sighing. He looks skyward.

"Helps for now, doe, and Ofdensen ams reals particutubulars about productions. You hears him. Besides, you's gots to keeps up with me, I'm de best." Skwisgaar has this sneaking suspicion that it'll be him keeping up with Toki for the majority of this job, but he obviously doesn't voice  _that_.

Toki just looks at him, instinctual politeness battling it out with incredulity across his face, and Skwisgaar smirks in response. Nathan comes around with the Pickles and the oxen and takes the log away. They move on to the next tree and repeat the process, crosscut saw into wood and again, Nathan collecting the log after they finish, Pickles resting and smoking his pipe. The day follows that pattern, and by early afternoon Toki's complaining of being hungry and Skwisgaar's laughing, telling him he told him so this morning. Toki glares at him. It seems that the physical activity has both literally and metaphorically warmed Toki up, sweat in his brow and fire in his eyes, an actual personality rearing its head.

They close the day out with several logs to their name, the most Skwisgaar has ever falled in a day, and Pickles is clapping them on the back as they retreat to the dining hall for dinner. "Good job, boys," he says, grinning. "Looks like Toki here is just what we needed."

"Oh, ams Toki workingks by himself?" Skwisgaar says, looking at Pickles. He's not joking, not really.

Pickles props his eyebrows up at him and says nothing. Toki, at Skwisgaar's side, smiles.

It's dark outside now, the camp lit with lanterns on long poles. They get their dinner, which is basically the same as breakfast instead with greens instead of pancakes, and take the same spots as that morning. The meal is similarly quiet, everybody exhausted, and all Skwisgaar's thinking about is his flannel blanket, his mattress and sweet, sweet sleep. Toki yawns around a cookie and the other guys give him shit for it, including Skwisgaar, though internally he sympathizes. They finish their meal and return to the cabin, fall like animals shot dead into their beds.

The second day is harder, the work less appealing, though Skwisgaar's muscles are used to it. They take a break from sawing to float a few logs down the river, which amazes Toki for some reason, childish awe alight in his wide eyes. It's colder that day, cold enough that Skwisgaar can feel it inside of his clothes, and he stands a little closer to Toki to sap his body heat. They're already falling into a rhythm: rise, eat, work, eat, sleep, and repeat. A whole week drains by with the same pattern, the temperature dropping then crawling up again, Skwisgaar becoming slowly accustomed to having work. He watches Toki and waits for him to get tired like all guys do but he doesn't; if anything, Toki grows more energetic, chirpy, almost  _annoying_. He chatters while he works and makes quick and easy friends with most of the men in the camp, though he sticks to Skwisgaar like a loyal puppy.

Sunday, their day of rest, rolls around. Skwisgaar sleeps in until light pours through the cracks in the walls of the cabin and only then does he rise, languid and lazy, stretching around and listening to his back crackle and pop. As he pivots he surveys the room: Toki is sitting against the wall of his corner with a book in his lap, Murderface, Nathan and Pickles are still asleep, and the other men that share their cabin are missing. Skwisgaar climbs out of bed and tugs on a thermal shirt, having slept in just his trousers. For lack of better things to do he walks over to Toki, kicks him in the shin to get his attention. Toki dog-ears the page and looks up.

"What yous readingks?" Skwisgaar asks, yawning.

"A dickshunsharry," Toki says. He lifts the book from his lap to show the cover to Skwisgaar: Webster's Unabridged. "Helps me with mines English," he explains.

"Doesn't bother," Skwisgaar says. He bends down and snatches the book from Toki's hands, throws it onto Toki's bed.

"Heys!" Toki says, scrambling to his feet and watching the arc of his book. He twitches when he hears the ruffle of pages against his blankets. "Dat's mines, treats it better!"

Skwisgaar shrugs and lets Toki fume in front of him. "Wants to get breaksfast? Ams hungry."

Toki narrows his eyes but unclenches his balled fists. "What's about dem?" he asks, tossing a thumb in the direction of Nathan, Murderface and Pickles's bunks.

Skwisgaar shrugs again. "Dey's grown mens," he says. "Dey gets dere own breakfast. Heys, speakingks of—how olds ams you?" He's been wondering; Toki looks far, far too young, baby fat clinging to his face and height questionable

"Ams seventeens," Toki says. He puffs his chest out like this is some huge accomplishment. "How olds ams  _you_?"

"Twenty-twos," Skwisgaar says. His blank face turns into a look of bemusement as he watch Toki narrow his eyes again, angry at Skwisgaar for being an entire half a decade older than him. At seventeen Skwisgaar had still been in Sweden, living with his whore of a mother, attending school and dreaming of the move he was to make in a year. "Comes on, breaksfast." He turns around without getting an answer and smiles to himself when he hear Toki's footsteps pick up behind him.

They eat breakfast sitting across from each other. Toki finishes his entire meal, a proper logger's appetite finally seizing him, and grins like the youth that he is. His hair, which he always forgets tie back, hangs in jags around his face, his eyes bright and his skin tan. There's something about him, or maybe in him, that makes Skwisgaar want to keep looking, keep talking, even if they're arguing about something inane (currently: who saws the fastest) or not even speaking at all, just observing each other in silence. It was never that easy with Magnus, who scared Skwisgaar a little (for good reason, it turns out) or the other guys, who tend to bore or frustrate Skwisgaar more often than not. It occurs to him that he's perhaps found an actual  _friend_ in Toki, not somebody with whom he's developed a close relationship and stays with out of habit.

After breakfast they return to the cabin. The other guys still haven't awoken, snoring loudly and sleeping with their bodies half-hanging from their beds. Skwisgaar looks at them, grabs his guitar case and heads back outside. He finds a small pile of logs just lying in the open and sits on them, takes his guitar out. He starts to play, some of the men hanging out whooping and hollering for it, letting time slip away. He notices Toki creeping out of the cabin about an hour after he's started to play, sitting in the snow against the wall of the cabin and opening his dictionary in his lap.

When he's tired of playing his guitar and Nathan, Pickles and Murderface have made the trip to get food and back Skwisgaar puts the instrument away and swings the case on his back, returns to the cabin to wash. The bucket at the back of the shanty is currently not in use and he strips in front of it, soaks his skin. He wraps a towel he's brought from home around his waist and leans in front of the only mirror in the cabin to shave. While he's doing this he hears Nathan, Pickles and Murderface playing a game of penniless poker (for gambling is forbidden) and the opening of the door, assumes that that's Toki. He washes his face and dresses in fresh clothes, reminding himself to take the other ones to be boiled. As he fishes around in his bag he passes a pair of fine scissors and a thought occurs to him.

"Heys, Tokis," he says. He turns to address Toki, who's sitting on the bottom bunk of his bed and picking under his nails. "Comes heres, I'll cuts yous hair."

"Whats? No! I likes my hair," Toki says, his mouth agape. He paws at a strand that hangs just over his shoulder.

Skwisgaar shakes his head. "Not  _cuts_ cuts," he says. He holds the scissors up and snaps them. "Just takes de dead and spikies ends off." He's sure there's a word for that in English but he can't remember it.

"Ohs," Toki says. He puts his hands down and stands up. "Dat's okay, I guess." He walks over to Skwisgaar and looks at him, tilting his head.

"Well, turns around," Skwisgaar says. Toki nods, once, and turns around, presenting the back of his head to Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar runs his fingers through Toki's hair to detangle it, finding it full of knots and admonishing Toki for that. From their poker game on the floor, Murderface calls them a bunch of ladies, and Skwisgaar flips Murderface off and insinuates that he prefers the company of men, which shuts him up. Skwisgaar proceeds to take the scissors, pinching the dead ends of Toki's hair between the index finger and thumb of his left hand as he cuts as straight as he can with the right. He has steady and skillful hands from having mastered the guitar, making the process easy, and an exact inch falls off. He moves across the line, Toki twitching only once and Skwisgaar managing not to screw up, then puts the scissors back in his bag and swivels Toki around via two hands on his shoulders.

"Looks good," Skwisgaar says, nodding at him with his hands on his shoulder. "You's just goingks to has to trusts me on dat, since dere's no double mirrors here."

"Does it looks good?" Toki asks, addressing the group on the floor.

"How the fuck should we know?" Nathan says, looking up from a hand of cards.

"Yeah, have you seen us?" Pickles says. He folds his arm over his knee, hiding his car from the view of the others as he talks. "Murderface's got a veritable bird's nest on his crown there, I don't think Nathan's cut his hair since his mom stopped doing it for him—" at this Nathan nods, mutters "That's true"—"and I just don't even care 'bout mine. Shit, just look at it." The matted mess Pickles's hair has become proves his point.

"Only women care about their hair," Murderface offers, looking up from his cards. He ducks his head when Skwisgaar takes the scissors and throws them at him.

The rest of the day passes by much too fast for Skwisgaar's tastes. He joins in on the poker game (while Toki returns to his dictionary), playing until it gets too dark to play and then putting a light in the middle instead of a pot to play some more. Booze is forbidden in the camp but Pickles has his pipe, which he passes around and lets everybody takes a few hits from. They laugh and when the poker game is over Nathan starts to sing in his low, rumbling voice, a sound that spreads out over the entire shanty and knocks inside of their chests. On this sound they float into the night, into sleep, and into the next day.

Another week of work crawls by, a mess of falling trees and shaping logs, floating them down the rivers and sending them back to town on trains. Toki remembers to knot his hair at the back of his head but still gets shit for being a greenhorn, Skwisgaar joining in. It's no denying that Toki's good—he's strong, he's fast, he'll probably be better than Skwisgaar once he gets to Skwisgaar's age, but for now Skwisgaar has the upper hand, and he's flexing it. Some sort of friendly rivalry sparks between them, something that makes them hold a hard gaze as they tug a saw back and forth, something that makes them fall trees faster than any other pair of crosscut sawyers. Even Ofdensen takes notice, prides them. They're young, they're tough, and they're enjoying the work, shouting at the sky every time the hard sound of a tree against a snowy ground hits their ears. Their mood is infectious, spreading amongst the camp as fast as an ailment.

On Saturday in the midafternoon they take a break from work to lug their crosscuts to the saw filer, the blades growing dull. The saw filer is a man by the name of Dick Knubbler. On Skwisgaar's first year of the job Dick had been another sawyer, commonly working with a man by the name of John Twinkletits, but a tragic accident had left Dick blind in his left eye and Twinkletits without arms. Skwisgaar doesn't know what happened to Twinkletits, but Knubbler remains, sharpening others' saws on his visage in the middle of the forest with an envious glint in the eye that's not clouded over. Skwisgaar swears he can see an actual flash of green.

"Gentlemen," Knubbler says. His voice is nasal and he's literally lifting his nose at them. "I see you require my fine services."

"Dat we do," Toki says. He hands the saw across his back to Knubbler.

"If it wasn't for me, you'd be nowhere," Dick says. He hunches over the saw and gets to work. Toki looks to Skwisgaar and props his eyebrows. Skwisgaar gives his best approximation of an  _I'll explain later_ look.

Within the space of half an hour they're slinging sharper saws over their shoulders and trekking to find another tree. They collect Pickles from the riverside, where he's tying logs together with Nathan, and seek out a particularly thick and resilient tree. Pickles clears debris while Skwisgaar and Toki stand off to the side, crosscut saws leaving imprints in the snow.

"Dat Knubbler guy," Toki says, looking at Skwisgaar. "What ams his problem?"

Skwisgaar tells Toki the story. He hadn't been there to see it but Murderface had, and though Murderface maybe isn't the most reliable of sources, he's gotten confirmation from others. Skwisgaar accompanies the tale with extravagant hand movements and facial expressions, gesturing to the tree and making a sweeping semicircle to reenact the tree's fall. Toki laughs amply, his laugh long and low and lovely, clutches at his stomach through his vest and flannel with gloved hands.

When Skwisgaar's finished with the story he's beaming with pride, satisfied, but then Toki's straightening himself up and looking into Skwisgaar's eyes, serious. "Do things like dat happen oftens?" he asks, looking in the direction of the tree they're about to cut. Pickles is just about finished clearing the area.

Skwisgaar shakes his head. "Maybes like once a years," he says. Toki's eyes don't change and so Skwisgaar tacks on, "No deaths, as long as I's been here."

"Yeah, but how long ams dat?" Toki asks. He crosses his arms over his chest but that doesn't steady the shake in his voice.

Skwisgaar counts backwards. "Four years," he says. "Pickle's ams be here likes twenty or somethingks, why doesn't you ask him?"

"Eh?" Pickles looks up from the trunk of the tree at his name. He drops his axe and stands up.

"Anybody ever dies while you's on de job?" Toki calls. His voice is a little louder than necessary for the distance between them, his hands cupped around his mouth.

Pickles shakes his head. "Just one," he says. "Long time 'go, though. Name was Jomfru—shit, I think he had a brother, who got paralyzed that same year. Bad times." He drops his chin to his chest, shakes his head some more.

"Sees? Nothingks to worries about," Skwisgaar says. He puts the hand not holding onto the end of a crosscut saw on Toki's shoulder, reconnects their eyes and smiles. Toki smiles back. Skwisgaar takes his hand away and drags his crosscut through the snow, towards the tree.

Their productivity levels only increase as the temperature decreases; Toki only warms up as they gravitate closer together, a moth circling a single candle flame. Skwisgaar starts getting shit for being the greenie's buddy that he brushes off his shoulders as easily as sodden lumps of snow, tilting his chin at them. And because Skwisgaar is  _that_ sort of person he sticks closer still to Toki. He learns that Toki has a nervous habit of wringing his fingers, that he's not the biggest fan of steak but loves cookies, that he's currently in the  _g_ words in the dictionary. Glad, glass, go, giant, good, great, Skwisgaar watches Toki's mouth form over the words, his jaw unhinging, his cheeks popping, his lips twitching, Skwisgaar sitting on the bed opposite Toki with his elbows on his knees and his knuckles kneading his cheekbones, the book flayed across Toki's knees.

In turn, Toki watches Skwisgaar play guitar. It takes him until they're feeling rested and comfortable enough to stay up later after they're finished working for the day, Skwisgaar plucking strings away from where the main group are hanging out around a lantern because he doesn't really need the light to see. Toki breaks away from the main group and walks to Skwisgaar, stands and listens. The next day Toki's sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, listening as aptly as a devout to a sermon, though Toki never goes to see the pastor when he comes around. Toki remains on the floor for a few days but come Sunday he's sitting beside Skwisgaar on the bed.

"You needs somethingks?" Skwisgaar asks, looking up at him and popping an eyebrow when the bed creaks. They're not in complete darkness, alleviated by leftover lantern light, and the already carved features of Toki's face look a little more intimidating.

"Noes," Toki says. He starts wringing his hands. "Just likes to watch you plays." In the severe shadows his skin flushes a darker shade of gray.

"You's strange," Skwisgaar says in response. He transitions into something a little more complicated, frenzied notes filling the air, and perhaps he's showing off. It's in his nature. Toki somehow falls asleep, his head connecting with Skwisgaar's shoulder, and Skwisgaar lets him stay like that until he decides to go to bed a half-hour later.

The next day Skwisgaar wakes earlier than he usually does, catching Toki in a state of undress, which is unusual. Toki is shy, keeping his body to himself. He rises before the others in the cabin and washes when it's empty, so apart from the first morning when Skwisgaar caught but a glimpse, he hasn't see Toki in anything less than his usual outfit of jeans and a flannel, a vest if it's particularly cold. Now Skwisgaar massages the sleep from his eyes and finds himself, like usual, watching Toki. He puts pants on first, the opposite of Skwisgaar, probably since he doesn't tuck his shirts. He turns his back to Skwisgaar for some reason that Skwisgaar can't process because he notices the dual tone of Toki's back again, and is struck by the realization of what that's from. His eyes adjusting to the dark it becomes clear, scars slapped across the surface of Toki's skin, haphazard and layered over one another. They look like they go deep, like they were once bleeding rivers, and Skwisgaar knows of nothing in nature, no disease or wild animal, that can leave marks like that.

Without thinking he scrambles off his bed and heads to Toki, his bare torso protesting the cold and Skwisgaar not paying much attention. He comes up behind Toki and puts one hand on his shoulder, reaches another one around to cover his mouth and silence Toki's inevitable yelp. Toki whips around, his forehead crinkled and eyes ablaze, prepared for a fight, and softens when he sees it's Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar drops his hand from Toki's mouth.

"What de fucks ams wrong wit' you?" Toki hisses, a little too loudly. Skwisgaar presses a finger to Toki's lips to quiet him, then rests both hands on his shoulders.

"Um—you's back," Skwisgaar says, and now he's feeling  _awkward_ , fantastic. "You has. Scars. May I sees dem again?"

"Oh," Toki says. As if switched off his face falls into a severe frown. "Dem."

"Ja," Skwisgaar says. There's a lapse in conversation. Toki's eyes are so far downcast Skwisgaar can see tiny veins spreading through the sea of white above his irises. He grips his shoulders to signal his attention. "Tokis?"

"Oh, yeah," Toki says. He sighs and removes Skwisgaar's hands. He turns around and lets Skwisgaar see. "Dey are, you knows, scars. I's had them since I ams was a little kids. It ams okay."

"I dink dere's a problems with our languages," Skwisgaar murmurs. He's ghosting his fingers over ghosts of  _something_ —maybe a whip, and imagining one of those slapping the skin of a young Toki's back is making him physically ill. "Dis amns't okays."

Toki swivels around then. He's close to Skwisgaar's face, close enough that their chests are touching, frigid skin to frigid skin. Skwisgaar tenses, retracts his pelvis, and Toki puts a finger in Skwisgaar's face, stands on his toes to get closer to eye contact. "Stops," Toki says. His voice is hard and husky, commanding, virile. "You doesn't talks about dem, you doesn't mention dem, you just—"

"Tokis," Skwisgaar says. His hands on Toki's shoulder again he pushes them down, looking around to make sure that the others haven't stirred. As far as he can tell, they haven't. "I won'ts, ja? You ams able to trusts me." His hands run down Toki's upper arms and then up again, his thumbs grazing Toki's collarbone.

The fire has not gone out of Toki's eyes but he nods, breaks loose from Skwisgaar. "I likes to finish getting' dressed now," he says. He picks up the shirt off the lower bunk of his bed.

"Me toos," Skwisgaar says, but he watches Toki before he goes, wanting to dip his fingers in the valleys left by his scars again. Before the other guys have risen he's at his bed, dressed and lacing up his boots. Toki keeps catching Skwisgaar looking at him and Skwisgaar, Toki.


	3. Chapter Three

That day in the forest is more intense than Skwisgaar's ever experienced. He and Toki keep grazing and gazingat each other, enough that Pickle's catching onto what he's calling  _some queer sort of air or somethin'_. It's fitting because the air  _is_  queer, strange and thick and heavy enough that Skwisgaar's feeling like it's become solid in his throat and he's choking. It's insufferable, and so when they should be off sharpening their saws with Knubbler, Skwisgaar pulls Toki into a thick cluster of trees. He doesn't have a plan, not at all, but they're secluded, and before Toki can so much as stammer out a  _what de fucks_ Skwisgaar's mouth is on his.

He's expecting to get a crosscut saw to the face but instead he gets Toki's hands, which is a much more preferable alternative. He backs Toki against a tree and holds him by the hips, his neck angled, kisses him until he's feeling dizzy and lightheaded. His attraction to men isn't something new—when it comes to sex Skwisgaar just doesn't give a fuck, but accessing women is so much easier—but Skwisgaar had been slow to realize that what he feels towards Toki  _is_ attraction, and he's coming to that realization now, their mouths connected. Maybe it's because the feelings aren't solely sexual, fringing into dimensions of connection that extend beyond the mouth, that Skwisgaar hasn't experienced before. These thoughts flicker fast across his frenzied brain and all he can focus on is tugging Toki's bottom lip between his teeth.

"What de  _fucks_ ," Toki repeats, as soon as they come apart, gasping for air. It's the opposite of the choking Skwisgaar had been feeling before, the air now too light and lonely to satisfy his lungs, truly nothing but vapors. Toki's eyes are lit up, but not with anger, and he's pursing his mouth.

Skwisgaar shrugs. "Um," he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I likes you, I think."

"You's better," is all Toki can reply with, and he's pulling Skwisgaar down to his mouth with a hand to the back of Skwisgaar's neck.

Skwisgaar's senses heighten, the idea of being caught only adding an extra layer of exhilaration. Toki is warm as Skwisgaar snakes his hands up his shirt, thankful that he never tucks it in, feeling well-formed muscles and smooth skin. Toki's hands are wrapping themselves in Skwisgaar's hair, tugging, and Skwisgaar's working a leg between Toki's, who in turn clamps his around Skwisgaar's. Skwisgaar can hear every noise in the forest, the rustle and crunch of pine needles, the distant cadence of voices, the faint sound of rushing water from the river nearby. He can hear Toki's mouth moving against his, wet, slick and hot. There's the issue of their budding erections, trapped in trousers and rubbing against each other as they grind their crotches. Skwisgaar doesn't have an answer for Toki when he breaks from him, his hand on Skwisgaar's neck and his breath coming in tufts against Skwisgaar's lips.

"We can'ts—you knows—" Skwisgaar says, praying to a God he doesn't believe in that Toki knows what he's talking about. In Sweden Skwisgaar had had an affair with a man seven years his senior who taught him how to refine his skills on the guitar as well as how to suck cock, but he'd been on the receiving end when it came to sex, and he'd learn the pain of going in dry firsthand. He didn't want to subject Toki to that, but he had to do  _something_ , the weight in his groin unbearable.

"Hands?" is Toki's solution.

Skwisgaar makes a face. "Dat's so," he says, and he pauses to remember the English word. This one comes to him. "Juveniles."

"You has a better idea?" Toki says, glaring at him. "We needs to get back to work, dey's goin' to come lookin' for us—" as he says this he looks over his shoulder, out the narrow gap they've come in through the trees. Skwisgaar does as well. They should be hidden, but it is true that they can't exactly take a break in the middle of a workday to fuck against a tree when they're supposed to be chopping them down.

Shrugging, Skwisgaar leans down to kiss Toki again, and instead of moving his hand up he moves it down, slipping into Toki's pants, using the other to steady himself against the tree. Toki jumps and shivers at Skwisgaar's touch, serving to swell both Skwisgaar's pride and his cock. Toki is eager, expressive, throat vibrating with noises he's not making and both hands inside of Skwisgaar's trousers. Toki comes in minutes, his head in the crook between Skwisgaar's neck and shoulder with Skwisgaar's skin pinched between his teeth, and the way he bites back a yelp sends Skwisgaar over the edge, too.

Toki stands up and pulls his hands back, covered in semen, and raises his eyebrows at Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar gestures to the snow while sucking Toki's ejaculate from his fingers, which Toki scrunches his nose at as he dips his hands into the snow.

"Guesses we goes back to doin' de trees," Toki says as he straightens up and adjusts his clothing. Skwisgaar tucks his shirt back and fiddles with his suspenders, nodding.

And they do return to their work, explaining to Pickles that they'd been stuck in line at the saw filer's when he asks where they've been. Pickles accept it without so much as a strange look, and when he comments that the queer air from earlier seems to have disappeared Skwisgaar and Toki just shrug their shoulders, blame it on breakfast. The majority of the tension has indeed vanished, in its place a new level of comfort and even anticipation. When their eyes meet they share a smile, a certain miniscule twitch of the muscles that to others would be inconspicuous but to them means that, yes, they will engage each other again.

The week passes by and they find every excuse to slip off from the rest and kiss each other in hidden places. They trek far back into the forest when they're supposed to be filing saws or going to the river to float laws, back to where the foliage is thick and there's a very real and present danger of wolves and bears. Skwisgaar sees Toki's back in the light of day and travels the map of scars with the pads of his fingers and tongue, whispers a prayer of redemption into his skin. Their productivity levels do not fall—if anything they increase, slicing through bark and falling trees with ease—and any possible danger, whether it be getting caught or mauled by a bear, seems inconsequential. Their dynamic does change, only comes into itself, and Skwisgaar feels like this is meant to be, some odd sort of destiny leading him from Sweden to America to take this job and find somebody who's made a similar trek and, eventually, fuck them senseless.

It takes until Sunday. On Sunday they're able to slip away from the rest without much consequence, as sometimes they get sick of each other and need the day to take a break and spend time alone. They tend to wake up earlier before the other guys anyway and they tug on their clothes, their boots, sitting on their beds and tossing smiles for the other to pick up in the dark. They sneak out of the cabin holding laughter in their chests that's overflowing as giggles. The sun is coming up over a fresh snowfall, the world is still, the air is cold, and Skwisgaar's feeling like he did when he first came on the job, like everything is beautiful and everything matters. When they've stepped over stray logs and equipment and made it into the forest he takes Toki's hand in his, leads him past tree stumps and stray branches, into an enclosure.

And it's awkward, it's slow, it's a little weird. It's everything Skwisgaar dislikes in sex. Toki is wide-eyed and trembling, more a stereotypical virgin than the man Skwisgaar has learned him to be, and it's sort of annoying and sort of arousing at the same time. They don't strip, it's too cold, and instead they stand there and look at each other for a few moments, the knowledge of what is about to happen hanging in the air between them. Skwisgaar can't help it, he starts to laugh, an insult perched on his tongue that gets smothered by Toki shoving his into Skwisgaar's mouth.

The feeling of laughter, the pleasant weight in his chest, does not die down as his hands find Toki's hips, his fingers stroking over the outline of Toki's structure. Toki's hands curl into the place where Skwisgaar's chest dips. Toki smells like Skwisgaar smells, a mixture of pine needles and virulence, the outdoors of the forest and the indoors of the sleeping shanty, and something about that makes Skwisgaar move his lips down Toki's jawline, down his neck, and push his shirt aside so he can suck a spot into secret skin. Toki is quieter than he has been this past week, almost solemn, his head tilted and his chin jutted up. Skwisgaar pulls back, looks at him.

"Ams you okay?" Skwisgaar asks, his voice but something that sounds small and as if it could take flight at any moment.

"Yeah," Toki says, a scrape of a thing, moving his head down to look Skwisgaar in the eye. Then, stronger: "What's you doin'? Gets back to dat." He pulls Skwisgaar's head down with one of his hands, the other moving to grip at Skwisgaar's side.

Skwisgaar polishes off the hickey and then falls to his knees in front of Toki, landing on a soft covering of pine needles and snow, shocking Toki. Skwisgaar nuzzles Toki's crotch before getting to anything rude, wishing to communicate how much this means, how much Skwisgaar appreciates and respects him. He's not sure if he's gotten the message across as he unbuttons Toki's pants and pulls them down just enough to release Toki's cock. It's not new, but the context is new, the bigger picture is new, and Skwisgaar takes it more slowly than he normally would. He missed sucking cock, somewhere deep in the back of his brain where his sexual urges exist more as notions and recognitions rather than formed thoughts, and Toki has one that's good for sucking, a thick girth and smooth texture. He only teases Toki, gets him to the point where he's starting to grab fistfuls of Skwisgaar's hair and thrust his hips forward, before rising and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, offering Toki a grin that's almost lecherous. Skwisgaar has romantic, fanciful notions of a beautiful mutual orgasm to take place later.

"Guess we's gonna does it now," Toki says, and it's sort of a stupid thing to say, brings out the boyishness in his face and around his eyes.

Skwisgaar shrugs, says, "Ja," leans forward to meld their mouths.

The position that works the best given the circumstances is Toki with his belly pressed into the bark of a tree, Skwisgaar behind him and holding Toki's hands with his fingers, pressing kisses to the hollow of Toki's cheek and neck. After Toki's good and ready, Skwisgaar's fingers and dick both slick with the Vaseline that he'd brought on the job with the intention of soothing chapped lips, their trousers caught between their upper thighs and knees, Skwisgaar guides himself inside of Toki.

Skwisgaar has had a lot of sex with both men and women. He knows his way around others' bodies, can melt them to the ground with a tap of his fingers. He's had really good sex and he's had really bad (from the end of his partner) sex. This is not new, but it  _feels_ so fucking new, fucking Toki like this. Toki makes breathy little moans like he's deflating the air in his lungs as slowly as possible and Skwisgaar kisses at the rising color on his cheeks. Objectively, the sex isn't that good, and Toki is relatively immobile, but the way he turns his head away from Skwisgaar but bucks backwards is making Skwisgaar feel these primal things inside of him, domestic things, like the desire to impregnate, though that's laughably absurd. The whole situation is laughably absurd, maybe, pressing his mouth in the junction of Toki's neck, slamming his cock into his ass, in the middle of this enclave of trees in the middle of a Wisconsin forest while on a job.

He feels heated despite the cool weather, and it doesn't take long for him to spill over and into Toki, his hips frenzying. Toki lets out a series of whines akin to an animal's and scrambles to grab ahold of his own cock; Skwisgaar stops him with one hand, gets him off with the other, all the while whispering things into Toki's skin that he's certain make no sense and follow no grammatical rules in any language. When Toki reaches orgasm he finally shouts, throws his head back with his eyes and pupils blasted, lets a groan into the air that could kill a man dead. Skwisgaar smiles, wraps his arms around Toki's chest and pulls him back towards him. They let themselves fall to the ground, spent.

For a long time they lay on their backs in the snow with their knees pointed in towards each other and hands on each other's chests, their faces red and their bodies tired. It is ethereal: the light filters in through the tree in a way that shadows lace their bodies, the snow is soft, and they have each other, their long hair loose and mixing between them. It lulls Skwisgaar to the type of sleep where he is still awake, but at such peace he knows he will feel well-rested when he rises.

Toki is the one to break the fragile solace. He rolls onto his back and brings his hands to his chest, links his fingers. "Wowee," he says, and Skwisgaar can hear the youth in his voice as Skwisgaar props himself up on an elbow.

"Ja," Skwisgaar says. "Dat's de sex."

"Oh, I knows about de sex," Toki says. He rolls his head, establishes eye contact. "In Norways I ams was betrothed to a goil, but I fucks her brother." He shrugs.

Skwisgaar's eyebrows raise; he's a little bit surprised. "Reallies?" he asks. "But you's so—innocents? Sorts of?" he reflects on it, thinks about the way Toki's muscles ripple beneath his shirt as he saws trees, thinks about the metallic glint in his eye he develops at the sight of a crosscut, and also about what it feels like to have his mouth covering Skwisgaar's body, and decides that that assumption was unfounded.

Toki shakes his head, which rustles snow and pine needles, makes an interesting noise. "Mines parents—dey caught me," he says, and the shame is thick in his voice. "And dey were real religious. I knows dat layin' with a man ams wrong—sorries—and I really likes de goil, but, I don't knows, goils ams complicated. I likes her brothers more. Anyways, mines parents was so mad dey lefts, and I knew that I'ds probablies be dead if I stayed in Norway. My father ams a real big important church guy. So I lefts the next day." He stares up at the cross-stitch of the trees as he talks, moves his hands to accompany his actions, a calculatedly impassive tone to his voice.

Skwisgaar pauses and flumps down into the snow. He takes a little while to consider this information, adding a new dimension to Toki. He supposes that he has not actually known Toki that long, but he also hasn't known any of his friends  _that_ long, and the life he lived in Sweden with its friends and lovers are long gone. When he looks at Toki he actually feels things, things in his gut and in his chest, things that flutter and fly. He does that now, sees the shadows of the forest on the rough outline of Toki's face, the way his eyes are closed. Toki has short, blunt eyelashes, and Skwisgaar reaches out to brush his thumb down them. They bristle and Toki opens his eyes, a shock into Skwisgaar's own, and he learns what coming home feels like.

"Well, I's certainlys not a virgin," Skwisgaar says, figuring that the best course of action is to share his own story. "Hasn't been since I was ams thirteens. Mines first time was wit de ladies dat used to watch me while mines mother worked. Mines mother's a whore," he grimaces as he tacks that piece of explanation on. "In Swedens ams a city-slickers. I moves de fucks out as soon as I can. Mines mother ams a bitch, but ams nothing like yours, come here." Skwisgaar sits up and beckons Toki into his arms, holds him. He toys with end strands of Toki's hair, faintly proud of himself for how straight he cut it.

After a few minutes Toki says, "We has to gets back to de camp, dey's gonna suspects somethin'," and Skwisgaar nods, though he also makes a noise of indignation. The camp, the job and the trees are all things he couldn't care less about right now—he just wants to rub at the tense spots in Toki's back and breathe in the scent of the crook of his neck. He wants to continue this conversation, deep and soulful and necessary, share their minds as they shared their bodies. But they both rise, let go of each other, and venture from their enclave of trees, through the forest and back to camp.

Despite Toki's worries their absence has not been noted, men pouring out of the makeshift church where mass is held by the traveling pastor on Sundays. Skwisgaar is surprised to see Murderface among them and calls his name when they're about ten feet away and in earshot.

"Hey, guysch," Murderface says, jogging away from the crowd to meet them. Skwisgaar resists the urge to turn his nose; this simple act gets Murderface panting and out of breath. "Yeah, juscht getting my daily dosche of religion. It fullfillsch a man, y'know?"

"Oh, I knows of many other things dat can fills a man," Skwisgaar says, now fighting the urge to smirk. Toki balls a fist to his mouth to stifle giggles.

Sunday comes and goes, work resuming as usual on Monday. Skwisgaar and Toki's productivity levels only increase, even with frequent breaks to grab at each other in hidden sections of the forests The atmosphere in the camp is jovial and warm with everybody pleased by production rates and good weather; even the food tastes better, especially when it's on Toki's tongue after heavy breakfasts. In the nights Skwisgaar plays poker or his guitar, both of which with Toki at his side, looking on.

"Hey, Skwisgaar, come play poker," Pickles says, the following Thursday, beckoning Skwisgaar to the floor with a fold of his hand. "You too, new kid."

Toki looks up from where his gaze has been focused, Skwisgaar's fingers on the guitar, Toki's balled into fists and pressing into his knees. "Whats? Really?"

"Yeah, don't make me say it twice," Pickles says, offering a shrug of one shoulder. "Get down here."

Skwisgaar puts his guitar aside, laying it on the bed as if he is tucking it in, then flocks alongside Toki to the floor. They gather their legs beneath them as Pickles dishes out the cards. The first round goes quickly and Toki ends up showing his hand (an unwise move), something about which seems familiar to Skwisgaar, though he can't recognize where he's seen an Ace of Hearts, a Five of Hearts and a Two of Spades, among others, before. They play a handful of games, all of which Toki loses and earns himself jeering from. He takes it well, though, volleying back retort of his own, and Skwisgaar sneaks glances at him while the other guys have their noses buried in their cards, pride and affection so heavy in his throat he feels he might suffocate on it.

After the poker game they blow the lights out and put themselves to bed. Skwisgaar and Toki linger in the fray between their bunks, something anticipatory fluttering in Skwisgaar's chest, making him want to walk forward and press his mouth to Toki's once more. But that would be foolish, obviously, and instead he makes a joke out of it: he takes Toki's hand, shakes it hard, and says, "Good games, kid."

"Doesn't calls me a kid," Toki says, and he shakes Skwisgaar's hand harder.

Skwisgaar shrugs. He thinks about leaning close and whispering something filthy in Toki's ear, but he can practically feel Pickles's eyes burning holes in the back of his head, that gossip. Instead he releases Toki's hand and quirks his lip, hoping Toki will get the message about how badly Skwisgaar wants to throw Toki to the floor and fuck him. Or be fucked; Skwisgaar isn't picky.

The first time Toki performs the penetration is three Sundays down the line. They're in the middle of the job now, a little under halfway through, and Skwisgaar tries hard not to think about what it'll be like to return to town. He knows he'll continue the affair, but Toki lives a few towns over and it would be suspicious to visit him so often. He'll have to convince him to move but he hasn't gotten a good chance to ask him about it—they spend whatever little time they get apart from the others with their hands and mouths buried in each other. Today is similar, sneaking into the trees on a rare break. They're farther back in the forest then they've been before, maybe even close to the lake, fear pushing them further and further. Skwisgaar's working the fasten on Toki's pants and has a hand on his shoulder, ready to pivot him around and bend him over, when Toki stops him, tilts his head up to meet Skwisgaar's eyes. Something about the combination of the heavy furrow of Toki's brow and the stubble on his jaw does things to Skwisgaar he's not sure he's experienced before.

"Cans I—" Toki says, and his voice is low and raspy, steady. Skwisgaar feels like he would be ready to agree to murder, arson, treason—whatever Toki's about to suggest. "Does you?"

As far as Skwisgaar's concerned it's the best idea he's ever heard, better than crosscut saws, telephones, or even the elusive light bulb he's heard of. He rests his forehead against Toki's and moves his hands up to hold his face, running a thumb over his cheekbone and down farther, feeling the graze of the tiny hairs on Toki's jaw. He uses his mouth not for audible confirmation but to press against Toki's own, working his tongue in between Toki's lips, feeling and sensing and wanting.

Toki is not nearly as hesitant as Skwisgaar expected him to be, rougher than Skwisgaar himself. He doesn't spend nearly as much time prepping Skwisgaar as Skwisgaar normally does for Toki, though Skwisgaar doesn't really need it, having regularly done this back in Sweden and sometimes doing it to himself during particularly heated masturbatory sessions. Toki takes the Vaseline from Skwisgaar's pockets and dips the fingers of his left hand in, then returns the tub to Skwisgaar's front pocket and pulls his trousers down, surges up to snag Skwisgaar's bottom lip between his teeth as he slides his fingers inside him. Skwisgaar has noticed that Toki has the simultaneously childish and arousing habit of biting on his lip or sticking out his tongue when he concentrates and now he seems to substitute Skwisgaar's for his own, nibbling on Skwisgaar's lips and tongue as he twists his fingers inside of Skwisgaar's ass. It's not long before Toki—never breaking the connection of their mouths—removes his hand and brings it to his cock, lathering it with the Vaseline. His breath becomes heavier; Skwisgaar places a palm flat on Toki's chest, his flannel unbuttoned to expose it, and feels the rise and fall of his breath. Toki removes it after a few seconds and throws an arm around Skwisgaar, swivels him around, and enters him, with no hesitation or warning. Skwisgaar yelps with surprise and brings his hand to his mouth, bites down on his knuckles. Toki notices and brings one hand around to Skwisgaar's mouth, replacing Skwisgaar's, and drops the other to his dick, tugging as Toki bucks. Toki's forehead hits Skwisgaar's shoulder and Skwisgaar steadies them with a hand to a tree, Toki taking his hand from Skwisgaar's mouth to wrap around his stomach, pull him closer. Skwisgaar squeezes his eyes shut and feels his orgasm in his thighs, tastes it.

Skwisgaar slumps, his bones sliding against each other with exhaustion, and Toki experiences his own orgasm with a broken shout in a higher pitch than Skwisgaar's ever heard from him. Skwisgaar laughs, unable to help it, and Toki bites the skin underneath the collar of Skwisgaar's shirt. Skwisgaar swats at him, lazily, lets his body fall against the tree.

"Comes here," Toki says, and he puts his other arm around Skwisgaar's stomach as well, turning him and taking him to his chest. Now with his arms around Skwisgaar's back he runs a hand through his hair and it's vaguely maternal in an unsettling, oedipal way. Skwisgaar sort of feels like crying, can feel the tears knocking behind his eyes, but he resists.

"Where's you learns to fucks like dat," he says, instead, lifting back and sliding his own arms around Toki's waist. They don't actually have this luxury of time, needing to return to camp soon, but he ignores that for now.

"I just…knows how," Toki says, and the way he scrunches his nose makes Skwisgaar want to kiss it, so he does. "Ams a natural." Toki smiles.

"I dinks I fucks you better than you fucks me," Skwisgaar says, shaking his head, suppressing the smile that's fighting to appear on his face.

"Ams that a challenge?" Toki asks, a sort of fire lighting in his squinted eyes.

Skwisgaar nods. "Ams a challenge," he says. "Let's shakes ons it."

They do, and Toki's smile grows larger, almost wolfish. "I think," he says, drawing his word out, "dat dis will be a very fun contest insdeed."


	4. Chapter Four

Skwisgaar has always been a competitive person. There are benefits—it always pushes him to the highest of his field, whatever that may be—and there are more obvious drawbacks. In a way, he supposes, he turns everything into a competition: he wants to be the best lumberjack, the handsomest man, the most skilled guitar player. He considers all of these competitions his victories that he regularly maintains. He has not, however, had so much fun as he has in this competition with Toki, possibly in his entire life. Their sex life, an infantile thing, has grown robust and plentiful, somehow. They get sloppy with their tracks, departing every Sunday to spend hours fucking in the forest, slipping off every chance they get to leave their job. Their productivity level levels, though it is high and fueled by this energy that sizzles between them. And people begin to notice.

"Man, look at you two go," Pickles says after stepping away from clearing a tree as Skwisgaar and Toki step in to saw it, in sync. "Ain't never seen a pair like you two in all my years."

Skwisgaar shrugs and grunts as he heaves the crosscut towards the tree, making eye contact with Toki, knowledge glinting in their eyes. "Nobody has ever makes me saws this well," he says, the sound of the crosscut cutting into bark his punctuation.

"That much is obvious," Pickles says, and there's a tone to his voice that makes Skwisgaar almost pause and look at him, but he does not. He only swings his arms, lets Toki do the staring for him.

The Thursday after Toki fucked him for the first time they come back from a romp in the trees to get their saw sharpened from Knubbler and Toki has buttoned his flannel wrong. Despite his blindness Knubbler notices and as he's sharpening the saws he says, "Toki, you got your shit buttoned all wrong, babe."

Toki looks down and curses; Skwisgaar gives him a pointed look. He wants to fix the buttons on Toki's shirt for him, since he's proved himself incapable, but he clearly cannot. Toki redoes the buttons, red in the face, and Knubbler chuckles.

Skwisgaar pulls Toki away from the men for a moment after that, looks at him. "You has to bes more careful," he hisses, looking everywhere but Toki's face. He feels bad for admonishing him, reminded of how he really is just a kid, but this is important. "If we ams gets caught, we's dead! Dese men—dey're religious and if any of dem amns't interested ins women dey sures am repressingks it. We coulds be  _arrested_ , Tokis. Dat's de type of trouble dat we could gets in."

"What's we gets arrested for?" Toki says. "Dat seems reallies stupid."

"Sodomy ams illegal, idiots," Skwisgaar says, slapping his forehead.

"Ams it?" Toki asks, his eyebrows shooting up. "I didn'ts know! I just moves here, Skwisgaar, you knows dat. Why amns't you tellin' me we does something illegal?"

"Well," Skwisgaar says, "does you want to stop?"

Toki does not pause and consider but instead immediately deadpans, "Um, no."

"Well, bes more careful, or we's gonna have to by force or by choice." Skwisgaar crosses his arms over his chest, unmistakably having won this argument.

They take more precautions and scale back on their time together, Skwisgaar having instilled a new fear in Toki. He feels bad, remembering how Toki came to America in the first place, but Skwisgaar is doing this out of necessity for protection. He has a good thing going that he doesn't want to lose: the feeling of Toki's body moving against his, the way his skin tastes, how he throws his head back whenever he comes. Skwisgaar has never really been in a relationship before, not really, but he does know that there's a certain elation that comes in the first few months together, a period of intense joy and obsession, and he feels that their newfound hesitance, coupled with the natural passage of time, allows them to transcend this stage and enter the warmth and certainty of something permanent. Skwisgaar wants to hold Toki's hand and sleep beside him most days as opposed to fuck him senseless, though that desire obviously still remains. One day following a night where neither of them slept particularly well for some reason, they fall asleep sitting beside each other with their heads leaning together on the bottom of a stack of logs. Nathan and Murderface wake them up when they come to float the logs downstream and they laugh about it, but it's nervous laughter for Skwisgaar and Toki.

It does, however, make the time they do spend together all that much better. That Sunday they eat breakfast with Nathan, Murderface and Pickles, after a night they filled half-up with poker and Skwisgaar dares to squeeze Toki's knee under the table, already feeling anticipatory arousal for what they will do later. Toki seems to pick up on this and draws breakfast out, breaking his cookie into miniscule pieces and eating them slowly, tantalizingly. The group separates after breakfast, Murderface going to the makeshift church, Pickles announcing his intentions to smoke from his pipe, Nathan to read some from the huge and ancient book of myths he keeps under his pillow. Skwisgaar looks at Toki and Toki at Skwisgaar and there is blank space in Skwisgaar's memory and then they are in the forest, between the trees, pawing at each other and melding themselves together.

The world seems to stop when they hear the sound of pine needles cracking under football near where they're stashed away. They go to put themselves back together, buttoning shirt and tucking dicks away, but it is too late. Charles Ofdensen appears from around a corner. The way the sun hits the spectacles he's wearing causes them to go white and shield his eyes, so Skwisgaar can only imagine what they look like and he doesn't really want to know.

"Boys," Ofdensen says, awkwardly. He stops walking, shoves his hands into his pocket and looks down, glare gone from the glasses. "I'm going to save you your, uh, dignity and, ah, not ask what you were up to."

Skwisgaar looks at Toki, who is whiter than the snow on the ground and shaking with his arms over his chest. Skwisgaar wants to put an arm around him and bring him close, shield him from Ofdensen, but he knows that's not going to work. Instead he exclaims, "I can explains!" though he really can't.

"Don't even try." Ofdensen pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers. His eyes are squeezed shut, his face arranged in a grimace. "I should have, ah, known, something was afoot."

Skwisgaar opens his mouth to say something, taken aback by the use of the word  _afoot,_ and flounders. Toki squeaks involuntarily, his eyes going wide and hands flying to cover his mouth.

"On a Sunday," Ofdensen says. His voice is flat, but Skwisgaar thinks he can pick up on a hint of disappointment, which causes a flood of negativity to wash through his body. "With the pastor conducting a sermon. I can't, ah, believe it."

"We's real sorries," Skwisgaar lies. He reaches out a hand which hovers in midair when he realizes it may not be the best idea to touch Ofdensen, his sins fresh on his skin.

"I'm sure you are," Ofdensen says. The way he says it makes it clear that he knows they're not. "I hate to do this to my two best sawyers—my, ah, bread and butter, if you will—but I'm going to have to, uh, report you." He moves his head as he says this, the glare overcoming his spectacles once more.

Everything in Skwisgaar falls. He looks at Toki to see something similar occurring in him, his body shaking and hands lowering from his mouth. He thinks back to what little Toki has told him of the childhood and what Skwisgaar has imagined to fill the large blank spaces and all he wants to do is touch Toki, tell him it'll be okay, when it's clear that it won't. They're about to be arrested for sodomy, which leads to two to five years in jail and will permanently soil their reputations. Hell, it'll  _become_ Toki's reputation, branding him as the kid Skwisgaar was sodomizing, a grandiose and dramatic affair that Skwisgaar is not looking forward to dealing with. It's making him feel ill towards Toki, which in turn makes Skwisgaar feel even worse, and now they're following Ofdensen back to the camp, the sound of pine needles cracking under footfall making Skwisgaar sick to his stomach.

The shame Skwisgaar feels reminds him of the shame he felt whenever the boys at school would tease him about having a whore for a mother, or when he caught his mother in the act, an occurrence he wishes had been scarcer. It is heavy and whole, as if somebody had held him by the hair and dunked him in a barrel of it. He feels everybody's eyes on every part of him as he follows Ofdensen into his small, personal cabin, making sure to walk a decent amount away from Toki. Skwisgaar knows that the men that stare at him as he passes—none of his friends among them—don't know why he's trailing Ofdensen, but he also knows they know it can't be good.

Ofdensen's cabin has two rooms, a front that serves as an office and his personal quarters behind them. He sits behind a desk, on which is a telephone and a neat stack of papers with a fountain pen beside them. He gestures for Skwisgaar and Toki to sit in the two chairs in front of his desk but they remain standing, close to the doorway as if there is any chance of escape.

"Well," Ofdensen says, knitting his fingers together and putting them on the desk. "I'm going to, ah, call the police and alert them of your, ah, arrival. Then you're going to take a train with one of our, ah, guards. You'll be separated, of course." Skwisgaar deplores how he feels joy at that.

Ofdensen calls the police using the telephone. Skwisgaar can feel Toki looking at him but keeps his gaze fixed ahead, observing Ofdensen's office. He has a picture of him and his wife—a colored woman, he really should be more open to sodomy, Skwisgaar thinks—hanging on the wall near his desk and another one on the corner that Skwisgaar cannot see the face of, only the ornate back of the frame. There are degrees in glass cases and fencing memorabilia on the wall as well, the door to his personal quarters locked. Skwisgaar realizes that he doesn't know that much about Ofdensen, actually, outside of his speech at the beginning of the job and the fact that he is their foreman. From what he's heard today, he's not keen to know more.

"Uh-huh, of course, thank you," Ofdensen says. He hangs the telephone up and clears his throat, catching Skwisgaar and Toki's attention. "Alright boys, follow me."

They depart from Ofdensen's office. Ofdensen beckons one of the men that do security—Crozier, Skwisgaar recalls—to accompany them. Crozier, a squat man with a jaw set hard, does so without words, unsettling Skwisgaar somewhat. He can feel Toki's unsettlement as well, wants to both slap him across the face for getting them into this situation and protect him from it.

They trudge out of camp and to the train. It's only filled at half capacity, logs lazing around it. Skwisgaar and Toki are put into the same car along with Crozier, who sits in the very back and pulls a small book from his pocket and begins to read out of it. Charles stands with one foot on the steps to the train and a hand curled around the doorway, looks at Skwisgaar and Toki, who are sitting a seat apart in the same row. "I really am sorry that I have to, ah, do this," Charles says. He frowns, as if to prove this point, but it looks mechanical and practiced to Skwisgaar. "You two are my best sawyers and you've done wonders for my productivity levels, but the law's the law, boys." He steps off and pulls the train door shut.

The train begins to move. Skwisgaar gives a hesitant glance at Crozier and sees that he appears to have fallen asleep. He turns to Toki and hisses, "This is all you's fault. If you just buttons yous shirt correctingly—"

"De fucks, Skwisgaar?" Toki yells back, whipping his head around. The veins that run up and down his neck are becoming visible. "You dinks Dick Knubbler tips Ofdensen off or somethin'? Dat's stupid."

"You's stupid!" Skwisgaar retorts, because that is the first thing that comes to mind. He shakes his head. "Noes, you gets sloppies, wit you's shouting and you's shirts buttons and you's teasingks me—"

"You loves it when I shouts!" Toki says. Skwisgaar glares at him in return, unable to deny that. "Anysway, dat other stuff, it ams so smalls. Just faces it Skwisgaar, we's unlucky. I's unlucky, dis shit follows me everywhere." Toki throws his body back in his seat, crosses his arms, and how badly Skwisgaar feels rises past the level of how pissed off he is.

"Toki," he says, trying to make his voice gentle, "I just dinks dat had yous been more caringful, we woulds not be in dis situations."

Toki turns his head just a bit, his lips pursed in a childish pout. He doesn't say anything, just looks at Skwisgaar, and Skwisgaar looks back. He's slightly less pissed off than he was ten minutes ago and the train rolls on, but the ramifications of what they've done hang above his head as real and present as the roof of the train. They sit in silence for a little while, Skwisgaar dropping his forehead down and looking out the window, watching waves of wilderness pass by. He lets his mind go blank, shuts his thoughts and emotions down.

He hears a faint scrape of Toki's voice as the near the end of the trip. "What ams was he even doin' out theres?"

Skwisgaar looks to Toki, who has his head tilted back on the seat and eyes closed, lips slightly parted. "I don'ts know," Skwisgaar says. He slumps in his seat, defeated.

"De gods really must hates me," Toki murmurs. Skwisgaar watch the ripples of his throat as he talks, the veins no longer visible.

"Ja, well," Skwisgaar says, and he rests his head and closes his eyes as well. "You's not goingks to get many chances to do de fucks in jails, so."

"Doesn't remind me," Toki groans. Skwisgaar smiles, in spite of himself.

"Maybe I could does you wit my hand? I dink dere's enough time, and Crozier ams asleep," Skwisgaar says. He's not serious, the way Toki sputtering in response causing his smile to grow.

The train stops, waking Crozier from his slumber. He grumbles and slides the book back in his pocket then stands up, gestures for Skwisgaar and Toki to follow him. Skwisgaar's getting real sick of this following people shit but he doesn't have a choice, and so he and Toki follow Crozier from the train station to the jailhouse with no comment. Skwisgaar passes faces—mostly of women—he recognizes and dodges their stares, keeping his head down. He feels sick and wrong, like he's cheating on the job, and itches to return to camp.

The jailhouse is a building connected to the courthouse, adjacent to town hall. A wooden signed burned with its intent flaps against the building. The windows are dark, impossible to see inside of, and Crozier marches in through the door. Skwisgaar and Toki exchange a look—Skwisgaar's been here before, to retrieve drunken friends, but Toki looks nervous, sweat collecting along his hairline though the temperature is low and Toki is dressed lightly. Skwisgaar puts a hand to Toki's lower back for a fraction of a moment, guides him through the door.

The inside is dim, the wooden floor dusty, and there is a frail looking man with his feet propped up on the desk he's sitting behind and a newspaper open in his arms. Skwisgaar sees a Bible on the desk, wonders about the supposed separation of church and state.

"Hello, Crozier," the man rasps, pulling his feet down from the table and sitting up.

"Ravenwood." Crozier nods at him.

"What is Skwisgaar Skwigelf doing here, and who's this?" Ravenwood tips his head in Toki's direction; Skwisgaar can almost hear his skin rustle against itself.

"You're not going to believe this," Crozier says. Ravenwood smiles this wicked little smile and Crozier continues. "They're in here for  _sodomy_."

"Now that is just disgusting, gentlemen," Ravenwood says. He folds his hands on the desk and rotates his gaze between Skwisgaar and Toki; Skwisgaar feels slimy,  _wormy_ , beneath it. "I'm sure the sheriff will want to have a word with you when he gets back. For now, I'm going to have to have Orlaag lock you up. Orlaag!" Ravenwood bellows the name, rising in his seat as he does so.

Another man emerges from the shadows of the cells. Skwisgaar knows them both, of course, as they're the law enforcers of his town and he's been here to collect his drunken friends before, but he's never felt so personally acquainted and victimized. Orlaag brings with him rope that he uses to tie Skwisgaar and Toki's hands behind their backs as he inspects them for weapons. He finds nothing but the Vaseline in Skwisgaar's front pocket, which he sneers at before replacing it, and leads them down the row of cells. He shoves Skwisgaar inside of one and Toki inside of the one across from it, shuts the door and locks them. All the while Skwisgaar can hear Crozier and Ravenwood chatting as though they're the best of friends.

"Enjoy your stay, gentlemen," Orlaag says as he tucks the key ring back inside his pocket and laughs, leaving the rows of cells to join the conversation between Crozier and Ravenwood.

Skwisgaar can tell that Toki is scared, looking at him through the bars of their cells; he's sitting on the bare bones of a bed that's in their both of their cells and shaking, the heels of his hands digging into his eyes. He tilts his head up to the ceiling and Skwisgaar does the same, seeing nothing but grime before he looks back down to Toki. Skwisgaar's feeling terrible at this point, mostly for himself but also for Toki, who he has grown fond of. Orlaag's inspection had reminded him of his guitar, more precisely the fact that he is not currently in possession of it, and all he can think about is the instrument lying in wait for him on his bed. If he had his guitar he might be able to calm Toki down, to pluck a melody that would soothe them both, but he does not.

"You knows, Tokis," Skwisgaar says. He leans against the corner of a cell and sticks his fingers between the bars, lazily. "I misses my guitar."

"You's thinkin' bout you's  _guitar_?" Toki says, sniffing and taking his hands from his eyes

Skwisgaar nods. "Ams my most prized possession," he says. He shifts, lets both of his arms dangle outside of the bars. "You hears me plays. Talents like dat don't come oversnight."

"I guesses," Toki says. He sniffs again; it's quite unbecoming. "Mines most prized possession is—stupids, really," he says, looking down at the floor.

"Oh, tells me," Skwisgaar says. He waves one of his hands in the air of the aisle.

"Well," Toki says. He stands up off the bed and walks to the bars. Unlike Skwisgaar, he wraps his hands around the bars and leans forward, puts his face close to them before he speaks. "When I was a littles kid and mines parents would throws me in de punishment holes I had a real cool pal clown doll dat I made to keeps me company. I don'ts have him anymore, since I lefts in such a hurries, but I dinks he's still my most prized."

Skwisgaar's first reaction is to laugh because it's the type of childish thing he would expect from Toki, but he stifles it, realizing it to be inappropriate. "Well, dat's very Tokis of you," he says instead, and he arranges his face into a weak smile.

Toki sighs, deflates, and rests his forehead against a bar. "Skwisgaar, what's de punishment for de sodomy?" he asks, speaking to the floor.

"Two to five years in jail times," Skwisgaar says. He looks down at the floor as well. "And social outscastingks."

"What which does dat word means? I never gots to de O's in mines dictionary." Toki's face is the most forlorn thing Skwisgaar has ever seen, exaggerated by the way the horrendous lighting of the jail shadows his features.

"It means dat peoples don'ts talks to you and walks around you in de streets and whatsnot," Skwisgaar says, impressed with his explanation.

"Oh. Dat sounds awful." Toki lifts himself up from the bars like a ragdoll come to life and goes back to the bed, slumps his body into it.

Skwisgaar stays at the bars, preening his ears to listen to Orlaag, Ravenwood and Crozier talk. They're talking about business and politics, boring to Skwisgaar, but apparently the sheriff is considering running for mayor and he needs their support. Skwisgaar laughs at the idea; the sheriff is one of the least personable men he's met. He hears a pause in the conversation and footsteps, the opening and closing of a door a rustling. He chances calling out, "Heys! Orlaag or Ravenswood or somebodys! When de fucks is de sheriff gonna be back?"

Orlaag reappears, walking down the aisle with his hands behind his back, that creepy bared-teeth smile still on his face. He gets close to Skwisgaar's cell and leans in, enough that he tip of his nose is inside. "Don't talk to me like that, kid," he says.

"Just askingks a question," Skwisgaar says. He crosses his arms.

"The sheriff will be back shortly." Orlaag turns around and ghosts down the aisle, towards the front of the jailhouse.

Toki rises from his bed, where he'd been laying with one leg on the ground, one leg propped up and an arm shielding his eyes. He walks to the bars and wraps his hands around them again, glares at Skwisgaar. "De fucks you doin', tryin' to gets us killed?"

"Dey can'ts kills us, dat's illegal," Skwisgaar says. He realizes the  _actual_ verisimilitude of what he said and blanches. "Fucks, dey mights kill us!" he whispers, his eyes darting to check the front of the building. All he can see is a rack of guns, which does nothing to calm the nerves bubbling inside of him.

Toki's eyes go wide, his jaw tensing. "Skwisgaars!" he says. "Doesn't talk like dat, dey might hear us!"

"Maybe we shouldn'ts talks at all," Skwisgaar says, and it's his turn to frown, because this is not comforting. Regardless, Toki nods, and they leave the bars simultaneously, both going to lay in bed. Skwisgaar lays with his palms facing up, a scowl on his face. Fucking arrested for sodomy.

He falls asleep, though he's not sure when, and wakes up to the sound of somebody else being thrown into a cell. This guy is noisy, rattling the bars and demanding to be let out. Skwisgaar, still with his eyes closed, hears Toki to yell at him to shut up. Skwisgaar smiles and slips back into sleep.

He's woken a second time late enough that it's dark outside, a few more lamps lit in the jailhouse. Somebody's walking down the aisle, bringing with them an almost literal force of cold, dread dripping down Skwisgaar's throat and pooling in his stomach. He rises in bed and watches Toki do the same, exchanges a knowing glance with him. It's the sheriff.

The sheriff is a hulking man, taller than even Skwisgaar and weighing probably twice the amount that Skwisgaar does. He has a severe widow's peak and long silver hair that seems to almost glimmer, even in the dark light of the jailhouse. His mouth is nothing but a line ringed by thin, chapped lips, his eyes narrow and emotionless. It's almost as if somebody embodied the darker aspects of the law in a human being and Skwisgaar's frightened and unable to imagine how scared Toki must be.

"Boys," the sheriff—Salacia, is his name—says, in his scant rasp of a voice. Skwisgaar doesn't know why everybody on the police force talks like they're permanently ill, but they do, save for the executioner, who doesn't talk at all. Skwisgaar hopes he won't have to see the executioner. "I hear Ofdensen has accused you of  _sodomy_." He says the last word slowly, filled with hate, and Skwisgaar swallows a lump in his throat.

There's really nothing to say. Salacia gazes at Toki—straight in the eyes—and then does the same for Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar feels like his heart might stop. "Well?" Salacia says, rubbing the overly long nails of his right index finger and thumb against each other.

Skwisgaar looks at Toki, who is positively petrified, and swallows. He's going to have to stand up for them, and so Skwisgaar stands up straighter, his knees feeling a little wobbly. "Wells, you sees, dat's a littles hard to prove—" he says.

"Are you calling Charles Ofdensen a liar?" Salacia asks. He says it with an air of humor but does not smile. "He is a well-respected man in this community—even with that, ah,  _wife_  of his. If— _when_ —this goes to court, the word of immigrants with questionable legal status and sexual preferences surely won't stand up."

"I's legal," Toki whimpers.

"Mes too," Skwisgaar says, unable to add anything else, because Salacia is for all intents and purposes correct.

"I think it would be best if you men were to just confess," Salacia says. He runs his nails across each other, emitting a sound that makes Skwisgaar want to dig his eardrums out with his bare hands.

Skwisgaar considers it, attempting to recall everything he knows about sodomy laws. He read up on it a little before seeking out his first tryst with an American man, wanting to be as safe as possible. It's only illegal if ejaculation occurs, which it hadn't in this case, but he's far too proud to bring  _that_ up. Even that doesn't clear up the legal issues—they'll just be charged with assault with the intent of sodomy. Either way, he's facing jail time and becoming a pariah.

"We can check, you know," Salacia says, snapping Skwisgaar from his thoughts. He watches as Toki's head literally snaps forward. "For evidence."

Evidence of ejaculation. Skwisgaar cringes, imagining what that would entail, and watches Toki do the same. A few moments float away from them, horrible and awkward, feeling like years.

Salacia brings a fingernail to his mouth and hooks it on his lips. Skwisgaar wants to vomit. "You know what, I'm feeling charitable tonight," he says. This does not soothe Skwisgaar in the slightest. "I'll give you boys until noon to make a decision. And if you don't, I'll add obstruction of justice to your charge." Then, and only for a brief moment, does he smile.


	5. Chapter Five

When Skwisgaar awakes for the third time to the sound of footsteps and whispers he expects to see Salacia, Orlaag, Ravenwood and the masked executioner, fed up with Skwisgaar and Toki's bullshit and ready to just hang them or chop off their heads and get it over with. Instead he sees three men, one of them short and slight, one of them tall and large, and another one of intermediate height and decent breadth, their voices too frenzied and Skwisgaar too tired to pick out any distinct characteristics. It's hard, at first, in the nonexistent lighting of the jailhouse to recognize them as Nathan, Pickles and Murderface, but Skwisgaar realizes that's who they are as they come closer to his cell. His eyes are wide and spirits high as he rushes to the bars.

"Schkwisgaar!" Murderface says. He tries to reach a hand through Skwisgaar's cell and finds himself too fat to do so; Skwisgaar laughs. Pickles shoots Murderface a look and produces Orlaag's key ring from somewhere, begins to fiddle with the keys to find the one for Skwisgaar's cell.

Toki rises on his bed, rubbing his eyes with one hand. "Moidaface? Nathans? Pickle?" he asks, taking his hand away and looking out through the cell. Skwisgaar's heart aches for him. "What's you doin's here?"

"Uh, we're here to buscht you out, what elsche," Murderface says. He crosses his arms over his chest. "You know, if thisch lumberjack thing doeschn't work out, I'd like to be a scherrif."

"Yeah, they're gonna make the guy that's helping some other guys bust out of jail a sheriff," Nathan says. He snorts into his hand.

"Shut up, you two! Do you want to get us caught?" Pickles scolds, his mouth tight. He sticks his tongue between his teeth and squints, inserts the next key into the lock on Skwisgaar's cell. It opens; Pickles whoops and Skwisgaar bites back a surprised and elated yelp. He walks out of his cell—more of a cage, really—and rushes to Toki's, puts his fingers through the bars to hold onto his. Maybe it's a little melodramatic, but with the idea of freedom so close to them, Skwisgaar wants to weep. He sees the wetness glistening in Toki's eyes and knows that he wants to, also.

"You know, I didn't think you two were actually, you know, when Charles said you were," Nathan says, standing to Skwisgaar's right. "And I still don't." He states this with a slight skeptical shade as Skwisgaar leans in and presses his mouth to Toki's.

"Eh, whatever, let them be happy." Pickles walks over and starts attempting to unlock Toki's cell. "I don't give a fuck, myself." In a stroke of luck and faith the next key on the ring is the one that unlocks Toki's cell, the sound of a lock in a key more glorious than any one Skwisgaar has head before, even the music that flows from his guitar. Toki runs out and comes to Skwisgaar, throws his arms around him.

"Thisch is dischguting, I might actually vomit," Murderface says, gagging for effect. Skwisgaar can almost hear Pickles rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is real sweet, but we gotta get out of here, guys. Orlaag's asleep at the front desk—that's how I nicked these. C'mon, and  _be quiet_." Pickles leads the group out of the jailhouse, returning the keys to Orlaag's desk, and Skwisgaar is able to hold Toki's hand for the half-minute it takes to make that walk. It is scandalous enough to arouse Skwisgaar in a faint way, but he's not thinking about sex, he's thinking about freedom. Sex can—sex  _will_ —come later.

Once outside Pickles leads them through vacant dark streets to the brink of town, to where Nathan lives in a rather impressive house. "I come from money," Nathan says, shrugging, as Pickles unlocks that door as well and ushers them inside. From money indeed, Nathan has electricity, and Pickles turns on the light in the main room. It's a single bulb in the middle of the ceiling sending a circle of yellowish light into the floor that pewters out into darkness, but Skwisgaar is fascinated, hurting his eyes as he stares into the bulb.

"We can't stay here long," Pickles says, attracting Skwisgaar's attention. "We need a plan, and we need a plan  _fast_ , 'cause we're all in some deep shit right now. Nathan, Murderface and I are skippin' out on work for this, and you two are on the run from the law, now. That's some deep shit, man, I'm telln' you, my brother's been there before, it did not end well at all for him. Heh, serves him right, though." His lecture fades out into chuckling, a crooked grin playing across his lips.

"You means you doesn't have a plan?" Toki asks. He looks at Skwisgaar like he's asking how that could possibly be; Skwisgaar shrugs.

"Nope," Nathan says. "Man, it feels fuckin' great to be home, though. I think I might go take a bath." He walks over to his sofa and sits on it, starts to undo the laces on his boots.

"Now isch  _scho_ not the time for bathsch!" Murderface says, balking at Nathan. He's hanging around Nathan's half-filled china cabinets, inspecting expensive pottery painted with images from ancient mythologies, leaving grubby smudges on the glass.

"You's just jealous 'cause you's never had a bath in you's life," Skwisgaar says, earning him laughter from everybody in the room. Murderface sputters and grows red in the face, visible in the light.

"Hey, don't leave fuckin' fingerprints on the fuckin' glass," Nathan grunts in Muderface's general direction as he pulls off his second boot and props his feet up on the couch, laying down and sighing with relaxation.

"Plan, people, we need a plan," Pickles says, heading into the kitchen and going through the cabinets. He finds what he seems to be looking for, a bottle of liquor, and brings it down. "Oh, baby, how I've missed  _you_ ," he coos, nuzzling it to his cheek.

"Well—Tokis and I should probablies talks about dat," Skwisgaar says. He looks at Toki, who nods, his serious determination underscored by the light and oddly cute. "So we'll go, you know, does that."

"Don't sodomize in my bedroom," Nathan calls from the couch. Pickles laughs; Murderface gags; Skwisgaar and Toki walk off, going upstairs.

They don't go to Nathan's bedroom but instead to his sort of office area, which is decorated with the heads of game he's hunted and his guns, a large desk with a larger chair in the middle of the room. There's nothing on the desk except for the thickest dictionary Skwisgaar has ever seen; Skwisgaar walks over to the desk and sits on it, Toki takes the dictionary and sits in the chair, depositing the tome in his lap.

Toki flips the dictionary open to the  _O's_ and reads aloud. " _Outcast: a person who is rejected or cast out, as from home or society; a homeless wanderer; vagabond._ You ams was kinda close, Skwisgaar."

"Shuts up," Skwisgaar says. He leans forward and plucks the dictionary from Toki's lap, distracting him with a deep kiss as he does it, and puts the book back on the desk. "Dis ams serious. We has to decide our futures."

Toki nods and leans back in the chair, screws his face up. Skwisgaar takes the moment of pause to wring his hands and think about the situation he's in, how it just keeps getting worse and worse. Caught in the act of and arrested for sodomy, now a felon alongside his friends and lover, he's fucked the life he built in America over. He supposes that he didn't build that much of a life, actually—three friends, a guitar, a job, and a small army of bastard children isn't much of a life, thought it was enjoyable. He redirects his attention to Toki when Toki begins to speak again. "I dinks the first things we needs to ask ourselves is dat if we dink we ams gonna has de futures  _togethers_." Toki says. Skwisgaar can tell he's a little nervous, his eyes focused on the doorway and his hands shaking. Skwisgaar puts one of his on Toki's.

Skwisgaar nods. "Dat's a good question," he says, and it's one that scares the fuck out of him. He's never been one for commitment, outside of choosing a favorite whore. He strokes Toki's fingers distractedly. "Does you wants to?"

"Does you?" Toki looks at him with a pointed stare.

"De sex ams pretty good," Skwisgaar says, grinning, and Toki leans forward to hit him in the arm. "Heys!"

"Ams serious! Dis is our  _lives_ , Skwisgaar, if dey find us dey kills us and den we has no lives!" Toki's voice rises in pitch as he rises in emotions. He takes his hands out from under Skwisgaar's to wave them around, his face pained.

"Sheesh, calms down, Toki, it ams okay. Ja, I dink for now we should plans our futures together," Skwisgaar says. He reaches out a hand to touch Toki's shoulder, comfort him, and Toki leans his head into it, the fine hairs on his cheeks bristling against Skwisgaar's skin.

"But where's we gonna go, Skwisgaar? What's we gonna do? I's scared." Toki closes his eyes. Skwisgaar moves closer to him, swinging his legs around the desk so he's facing Toki instead of the rest of the room.

"Ams okay, we wills figure somethingks out. I kinds of has an idea, actuallsies," Skwisgaar says, making this up as he goes. He reaches out to smooth Toki's hair down. "I dinks we should just leaves America."

"And goes where?" Toki lifts his head from Skwisgaar's hand and looks at him like he's stupid. "Norway? Can't goes back dere, mines parents will find me."

Skwisgaar doesn't bother to point out how large a nation Norway is. "Sweden," he says, nodding. "We'll goes to Sweden and lives dere."

"Okays," Toki says. He nods. "Okay. We'll goes to Sweden." And then he laughs, long and hard and loud, doubling over and hitting his forehead on the desk. He laughs so hard he cries, his face almost as burgundy as the accents in Nathan's house. It infects Skwisgaar, who starts laughing too, laying down on the desk and snagging his shoulder on the dictionary.

They collect themselves and head back downstairs, where they find Pickles, Nathan and Murderface sitting at Nathan's dining table and drinking. Skwisgaar and Toki slide in besides Murderface and accept the shot glasses that are passed to them, downing them in a fluid motion. Toki coughs a little and Skwisgaar pats him on the back, laughs at him, and calls him a baby.

"So it's, like, four o'clock in the mornin'," Pickles says, slamming his fist on the table. "We gotta get a move on before the town wakes up. There's a train out of here that we can catch, but I don't know where it goes." He pours another shot of liquor, unperturbed.

"We knows where we's goin', now," Toki says, overly proud of himself. He takes a second shot of liquor and smacks both his mouth and the glass on the table when he's finished. "Sweden."

"You can't take a train to Schweden," Murderface says.

"We amsn't goingks to takes de train to Sweden, idiots," Skwisgaar says. Toki laughs until he hiccups, which forces him to laugh harder.

"Jesus Christ, and this is with two shots of liquor," Pickles murmurs, rubbing at his temples. The bottle on the table is almost empty, maybe an inch of liquid left, and Pickles looks at it like he would his dying mother. "C'mon guys, let's go, hurry up. Skwisgaar, Toki, we got your things from camp, they're by the door."

"Reallies?" Skwisgaar says, perking up. He wastes no time in leaving the table, not even making sure that Toki's coming with, though Toki does fall in step beside him.

They go quickly towards the door and find their stuff spilling out of unclosed bags slumped by the entrance. Skwisgaar can't believe he didn't see them earlier, and it feels like unwrapping gifts for Christmas as he brings his guitar case into his arms. Pickles has his alcohol, Toki his dictionary, Nathan his books and Murderface his knives, but Skwisgaar has his guitar, and just the sight of the thing makes him believe that everything will work out in the end. Toki's on the floor rummaging through his bag, muttering to himself about everything he finds, and Skwisgaar's holding the guitar like it's his own child. The rest of the guys come to them, pull their coats on. Skwisgaar grabs his bag and slings his guitar over his back, Toki doing the same sans the guitar. They open Nathan's door into the darkness of Tomahawk and walk.

Skwisgaar's house is not on the way to the train station and Skwisgaar doesn't really need anything from there, but he can't help but feel a sense of nostalgia for what he's leaving behind. He has no particular attachment to his house, it's just a cabin that does its job of sheltering him with a few pieces of shaky furniture that he built himself, but it had been his home for the last four years. He supposes that his house is representative of all that he feels towards America, a shelter, a necessary stop on his way in his grand trip of life, but a simple glance Toki's way reminds him that it was just that: a necessary yet temporary stop. Something that brought him closer to where he should be.

The train station is relatively empty and either the sheriff and his cronies haven't noticed Skwisgaar and Toki are missing yet or they're too stupid to check the best way out of town because they're not there. They pay for their tickets and board the train, having an entire cartridge to themselves. They squish themselves into the booth around a small train table and Pickles produces a pack of cards from his pocket, starts dealing them out. Nathan lights a cigar and sticks it between his teeth. Murderface is sitting uncomfortably close to Skwisgaar, Toki comfortably close on the other side. Everything feels almost the same as it did before that fateful job, except for Toki, but Skwisgaar is not about to complain about the presence of Toki. He holds his cards in one of his hands—it's not a serious game, the risk of cheating more of an added element of fun than anything else—and Toki's knee under the table in the other. They don't play for anything but time.

Everybody is too amped up to sleep for the three-hour train ride, which takes them from Tomahawk to Aurora, Illinois. They exit the train and stretch their legs among the streets, which Skwisgaar is surprised to see aren't all that much different from Tomahawk's. Skwisgaar is starting to feel creaky and tired after fitful sleep, stress and extended travel, but they know crossing the border isn't going to thwart Salacia and his associates, so they only make a circle around the city before buying another train ticket. They once more board and cram themselves around a table but this time half of them fall asleep, Toki's head dropping to Skwisgaar's shoulder and Skwisgaar's dropping against the window, Muderface's snoring perforating the air. Nathan and Pickles seem to stay awake, both of them smoking cigars and laughing about jokes they've had long before Skwisgaar met them.

This time they arrive in Kentucky, which is quite different than from what Skwisgaar knows, the air warmer and drier. In Kentucky they take their time, everybody exhausted, and grab a handful of hotel room between them. It's early in the afternoon and the sun is high but they all crawl inside their rooms, Skwisgaar and Toki sharing one. They're lethargic as they undress, tugging boots off aching feet and unbuttoning stiff shirts, but when they crawl into bed together Skwisgaar feels a small spike of adrenaline. He wraps his hands around Toki's bare back and torso and pulls him into his chest, pushes his nose into his hair.

"Sleepin's together," Skwisgaar mumbles into Toki. "Finallies." He tugs on Toki's body, punctuation.

"Yeah," Toki says, and he yawns, and that is that, because he begins to snore softly. Skwisgaar smiles and lets himself drop into his exhaustion as well.

When they wake up they've come apart, Skwisgaar on his back with one hand over his chest and the other draped across Toki's, Toki still on his side and curled up. The sun is lower in the sky and it's close to nighttime but not there yet. They pull a change of clothes from their bags and dress again; Skwisgaar musses up the other bed in the room just in case, not caring to be accused of sodomy again. They leave their room and knock on Nathan and Pickles's beside them, Pickles answering the door after a few minutes.

"Quit your bangin', Christ," Pickles mutters. He pulls the door open and lets them inside their room, which looks the exact same as Skwisgaar and Toki's, two bed against the wall and a chest of drawers against another, wood paneling of the wall exposed beneath peeling gray paint. Nathan is sitting on the bed with spectacles and a book, both of which he stashes away when he sees Skwisgaar and Toki, and Pickles is smoking from his pipe, the thing squeezed between his teeth at the moment.

"You sleeps at all?" Toki asks.

"Nah—when we heard what happened to you on Sunday—yesterday? Fuckin' hell, I don't even know—we turned in early for the night so we could wake up in the middle of it to come get you. Murderface didn't have the same idea, so he's out," Pickles says. He laughs and takes the pipe away, offers it to Skwisgaar and Toki, who decline. "Suit yourselves. Anyway. How are you two plannin' on gettin' back to Sweden?"

"By boat," Toki chirps.

Skwisgaar slaps his forehead. "I figures I just goes out the way I comes. News York. I dink the place ams was called Ellie's Island?"

"No, ams was Jealous Island," Toki says, turning towards Skwisgaar.

"Toki, dat's stupid, why would it be nameds dat?" Skwisgaar asks. "Who's dey jealous of, de Americans? Dey one of dem's now. Dat's idiots, Tokis."

"Shut up, you two," Pickles says, drawing Skwisgaar and Toki back from the dispute. He takes another puff from the pipe and continues. "It's Ellis Island, and it's only for immigration, but I think you can take a boat out of here from New York, sure, there's plenty of ports. Ain't that right, Nathan?"

"I don't know," Nathan calls from the bed, where he's begun reading again, apparently bored by their conversation. "This is the farthest I've traveled in my entire fuckin' life."

"I've only done the immigration piece of it," Pickles says, waving a hand to dismiss Nathan's lack of knowledge. "But I remember seeing a fuckload of boats back when I was a tot."

"We'll sees when we gets dere," Skwisgaar says. "When are we leavin'—what's dis place named, Lyinsville?"

"Now  _dat's_ what which ams idiots, Skwisgaar," Toki says, pursing his lips up the smuggest possible way. "What's dey lyin's bot? Ams obviously Lousivillains dat we's stayin's in."

"Who's de villain?" Skwisgaar asks, sneering, and Pickles groans around his pipe.

They hang out with Nathan and Pickles for about an hour, sitting on their floor and playing a game of poker—this time for actual money, with Toki winning the pot—until Murderface knocks on the door. With Murderface in their ranks they check out of the hotel and head back to the train station, boarding the next one. They're rowdy on the train, now well-rested, and disturb a small family that complains to the conductor. They're moved to an empty cartridge, but they're not about to complain about that. Skwisgaar sits with his legs taking up two seats on their own and plays his guitar, gets the group to sing along with him.

But they've once more neglected to check where they bought their tickets for and instead of going further east they end up back west, in Missouri. When they've realized what they've done the air turns sour and it turns sour quick, everybody blaming each other and calling names outside the train station in the dark, until Pickles finds a bench to clamber on top of and whistles.

"Let's just check the tickets for where they're to next time, alright, you fuckers?" Pickles calls, brandishing his arms in the air like he's carrying loaded guns. "Hell, maybe this is even better, maybe we're throwin' whoever's comin' after us off our trails."

"That's a good point, yeah, that makes sense," Nathan says, still glowering at Murderface who had thrown some heavy racial slurs his ways a few moments prior.

"Okay, good," Pickles says, exasperated. He steps off the bench and goes back inside the train station, gesturing for the rest to follow him. They do, and this time at the counter they check the schedule and buy tickets for a long trip to North Carolina, figuring they'll go up along the coast and sightsee before arriving in New York.

In North Carolina Murderface makes them travel to Gettysburg. Skwisgaar has no interest whatsoever in the Civil War, nor does Toki, and they hang in the back and make fun of it, laughing their asses off when Murderface claims that his father fought here. Nathan expresses interest, grilling Murderface for details about the carnage and bloodshed—Skwisgaar and Toki can tell that Murderface is bullshitting hard, but Nathan is either entertaining him or too stupid to realize otherwise—and Pickles is mildly interested, staring into the field while he smokes his pipe. When gray gathers in the sky and it starts to rain they leave, Murderface grumbling and griping about disrespect of history.

"This is the last fuckin' stop on the Civil War tour, though," Pickles says when they're at the next train station, buying tickets to venture into Maryland.

There isn't shit to do in Maryland but by then it's nighttime and they're tired, so they get a handful of hotel rooms and turn in for the night. Skwisgaar and Toki take the opportunity to finally fuck, feeling like it's been years as opposed to days, stuffing their hands over and inside of each other's mouths to keep them quiet and trying not to let the rusted bedframe screech too much. The effort makes them laugh, and it's pleasant, it's something Skwisgaar's looking forward to having a lot in his future. In the morning they go to the washroom together and bathe each other, indulgent though they can't afford to be. They're doing well with money but not so much with time and paranoia's beginning to seep into everybody's pores.

From Maryland they take the train to New York. It's midday and there's many people on that train, a low hum of conversation hanging in the air. They find themselves squished around a table with cards in their hands again—for the last time, Skwisgaar thinks, and he's starting to feel all sorts of sadness and sentiment. He doesn't risk touching Toki on a train so crowded but he wants to, he wants to remind himself that the decisions he's made are leading up to something good, something better than the life and the people he's about to leave behind.

"Does you knows what you all are goin' to does?" Toki asks Nathan, Pickles and Murderface, who are all sitting across from them, their eyes on their cards.

"Stay in New York, maybe," Pickles says, and then he lays his cards down and stretches. "I fold."

"I kind of want to go to Florida, maybe," Nathan says. "I fuckin' fold, too. Since, you know, my grandmother was a Seminole." He lays his cards and hands on the table.

"Fold," Murderface lisps, sliding his cards so they scatter across the tabletop instead of just laying them down. "I'm juscht following thesche two."

Skwisgaar looks at his cards and, seeing the frustratingly familiar triple of an Ace of Hearts, a Five of Hearts and a Two of Spades among others, folds. Collecting the money in his arms and beaming, Toki wins the pot.

The train chugs into New York. Skwisgaar remembers it because he made this journey in reverse, from New York to Tomahawk, going where he had heard Swedes talk about going when they arrived in America when he was a young boy. It's a huge and bustling city, filling Skwisgaar with a subtle childish awe. A similar awe lights up on Toki's face as he sees the tall buildings and streets clogged with people, and he reaches down to squeeze Skwisgaar's hand while they're passing through a throng of others. Skwisgaar allows it, because nobody will see, and because he understands.

Of course Pickles is the one that stops them as they near the harbor. It hits Skwisgaar then, his nostrils stuffed with a putrid smell and the winter weather dreary around him, Toki standing so close their elbows brush, that this is real, a real thing that he is doing, a real decision that he is making. It floods him with a sense of familiarity—he'd done the same thing just a few years ago, just in reverse, and it had felt right then. It feels right now, too, even more so, and Skwisgaar is nervous and he can tell that Toki is nervous, too, but he knows that this is correct, this is where destiny is taking them on its winding road. He looks around and, judging it safe, reaches down to squeeze Toki's hand, a quick gesture.

"Do you two have enough money? The fares are right there." Pickles turns around and points to a sign with fares on it. Skwisgaar looks at the fares and feels his heart drop when he realizes he's off by a significant amount of money to buy just one ticket. He watches as Toki does the same. They shake their head in unison.

But Pickles smiles. "Figured. Come on, guys, Nathan here is rich." He elbows Nathan, who nods and digs into his pocket, pulling out some bills. Any other day Skwisgaar would be too prideful, but here he readily accepts, shaking Nathan's hand when they make the transaction. When it's Toki's turn to receive his money he pulls Nathan in for a hug, which Nathan does not reciprocate but does allow.

"Guessh thisch isch goodbye, then," Murderface says from Pickles's other side, almost bashful. "I'm telling you, you two are crazy. I love it here, I'd never leave, but I guessch your love for each other'sch dicksch is more than that for democracy and freedom."

Skwisgaar ignores the subtle jab. "Ams gonna miss yous, Murderface," he says, with all of the sincerity, because he knows it will get under Murderface's his skin. Toki echoes Skwisgaar's statement.

"Gonna have to agree with Murderface there," Nathan says. "Fuckin' love America, I'm rich here, you two are fuckin' idiots." But he says it fondly, with the faintest hint of a smile on his face, and that's good enough for Skwisgaar and Toki, who both nod.

Pickles is last, of course, and it's the hardest for the both of them. It's Pickles that orchestrated their getaway, Pickles who has done so much for them, even if it was Nathan that provided them the means to actually leave. There's unashamed tears in Pickles's eyes as he pulls Skwisgaar and Toki down, an arm for each of them, into a hug, patting their backs. "I'd never go back to Ireland, but I understand why you're doin' this," Pickles says, releasing them. "I hope you're happy in Sweden. You should write. Or, uh, maybe you should learn how to write in English before you do, 'cause I ain't learnin' Swedish or Norwegian." Pickles laughs weakly.

"Rights," Skwisgaar says, as Toki nods and says, "ofs course."

They stand there just looking at each other for a few moments, until Skwisgaar feels too overcome with emotion and has to turn away, go towards the harbor. Toki follows him. They're silent as they buy their tickets, as they wait around for the boat, as they board the boat to leave. Luck has followed Skwisgaar here—the trains running on time, Nathan having the money, a boat to Sweden just happening to be in the harbor, and Skwisgaar is afraid to curse it. He's also afraid of letting his emotions spill and show in such a public place, only trading secret squeezes of the hand with Toki every few minutes.

They stand on the deck of the boat with the rest of the passengers as it leaves the port. In the thick crowd of excited people nobody's looking at the two Scandinavians shoved together. In the tick crowd of people nobody's paying attention to anybody but themselves. In the thick crowd of excited people everybody's touching each other, crying into each other, dreaming of home. So: Skwisgaar and Toki stand with their arms around each other, looking not towards the shore behind but instead to the open seas ahead.


End file.
